Call for Papers – Annual Graduate Symposium — * Media Fever: Religion as Mediation *

Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto

Call for Papers – Annual Graduate Symposium
April 11th & 12th, 2013

* Media Fever: Religion as Mediation *

In conversation with the forthcoming issue of our graduate student journal, “Stories We Tell,
Stories We Remember,” the Graduate Student Association at the University of Toronto’s Department for the Study of Religion is issuing a call for papers on the theme of religion, media and mediation. Accepted papers will be presented at the department’s annual Graduate Symposium, to be held on Thursday, April 11th and Friday, April 12th, 2013.

From the invention of cylinder seals to the digital age, the development of novel media has been integrally bound to key shifts and debates in a wide range of historical and religious contexts. To foreground ‘religious’ media, however, is also to position mediation as a central modality of religious praxis. Engaging religion as mediation evokes hotly contested paradigms in the study of religion – for example, by asking whether religious life is best understood by appeal to its material bases, or whether religious formation is fundamentally a hermeneutic project. We invite submissions treating the proposition that media, broadly conceived, are intrinsic to religious life. Papers that offer up broad, critical reflections on the limits of this “turn” to mediation are especially welcome. As the Symposium is an interdisciplinary endeavour, we encourage submissions treating any historical or contemporary religious context, from a diversity of methodological, theoretical and disciplinary vantage points.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
processes of objectification and the production of religious subjectivities; the intersection of visual and scriptural interpretation; ‘digital religion’; contested terrain in religious hermeneutics; intermediary figures (prophets, holy men/women, institutions; scholarly interlocutors); material culture; affect, memory, and imagination; economics of media production; the editorial process; authority, tradition and innovation; the politics of transmission; and religious mediation and the public sphere.

In order to be considered, interested applicants are to submit 250-300 word proposals including
paper title, five keywords, author name, institutional affiliation, and contact information to Maria Dasios and Matt King at mediafeveruoft@gmail.com by January 4th, 2013.
Successful applicants will be notified by February 1st, 2013.

*We are pleased to announce a keynote address and documentary screening by Dr. Annalisa Butticci, Marie Curie Fellow, Harvard Divinity School*