Ethnography, Religion, and Ethics — 4th Annual Workshop in Applied Ethics — Northeastern University, Boston, MA, October 3-5, 2014

Call for Abstracts

Ethnography, Religion, and Ethics
4th Annual Workshop in Applied Ethics
Northeastern University, Boston, MA, October 3-5, 2014

How do scholars study the moral dimensions of human life in the everyday contexts of religious communities? In what ways could sustained attention to “lived ethics” transform the disciplines of anthropology, philosophy, and religious ethics? This interdisciplinary workshop will examine these questions in the context of ethnography, religion, and ethics and explore how morality is constituted in and materialized by the speech, action, and practices of religious communities.

The workshop will bring together scholars whose research provokes an inter-disciplinary conversation on the philosophy and practice of religion and ethics, with a focus on the ethnographic methods and issues that arise in the study of religion. The workshop is designed to be highly interactive, and to provide speakers with constructive feedback from colleagues working on related issues.
We invite the submission of abstracts (no more than 750 words) from researchers working on religious ethics using ethnographic techniques and ethnographers of religious communities concerned with ethics broadly construed and including character formation, piety, critique, transgression, deviance, manners, and ethical argumentation. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Using ethnographic techniques to study religious ethics
• Assessing ethnography as a method for religious ethics
• Ethical issues in ethnography
• Methods of ethnography
• Relationship between the disciplines of ethics and anthropology
• Transmission of moral traditions
• How recent definitions of “morality” have shaped the ethnographic study of ethics

Please email submissions (and questions) to Liz Bucar (e.bucar@neu.edu) or Jung Lee (ju.lee@neu.edu).

The abstract submission deadline is May 1st, 2014. Abstracts will be reviewed by a program committee. Those selected for the program will be asked to submit completed papers one month prior to the workshop, and papers will be made available on the workshop website. Papers can be of any length, but speakers will be limited to twenty-five minutes to present their ideas, followed by thirty minutes of discussion. More information about the workshop will be available at http://www.northeastern.edu/ethics/. This workshop is sponsored by Northeastern’s Ethics Institute and Department of Philosophy and Religion.

Whitney Kelting
Northeastern University