2017 APSA Annual Meeting: New Directions in the Study of Religion and Politics

08/18/2017

Sat, September 2, 4:00 to 5:30 pm, Hilton Union Square, Franciscan C

Session Description

What do we mean when we talk about ‘religion and politics’ in political science today? This panel will pursue an interdisciplinary and post-separationist approach to religion and politics, bringing together political scientists from different subfields to present recent research and reflect on new directions in the study of religion and politics. Through this exchange, we hope to challenge key assumptions that each subfield brings to the study of religion and politics, both in the concepts and definitions that we use, as well as the events, theories, and historical developments that are deemed relevant to this field of study.

The four papers, to be presented by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Amy Gais, Matthew Nelson, and Elizabeth Pritchard, represent a diverse approach to the study of religion and politics. Hurd will discuss recent work on the politics of religion in the Genocide Convention. Gais will rethink the implications of the liberty of conscience in terms of religious conduct in the public sphere. Nelson examines the role of state-level administration procedures in the principle of freedom of religion with focused attention on conversions in Malaysia. Pritchard explores recent attempts to delineate the sphere of religion from politics, asking what is obscured by the insistence that religion is not fundamentally political? Despite their methodological and theoretical differences, these four scholars share a commitment to thinking carefully about the extent to which concepts in the study of religion and politics privilege (and inevitably, exclude) specific modes of religiosity, as well as specific modalities of politics.

Andrew Murphy will serve as the discussant for these four papers and Matthew Scherer will chair the panel. We include four paper abstracts.