Call for Papers

AAG 2014: Tampa

The AAG’s Geography of Religions and Belief Systems (GORABS) Specialty Group invites papers and session to be submitted for sponsorship for the AAG’s Annual Meeting in Tampa, FL in 2014.

GORABS promotes the use of religion as a geographical analytic. Historically, the group has focused on how religion impresses a human impact on the environment and vice versa. Complementing these environmental approaches, more recent work in geographies of religion have revealed that religion is a productive lens through which to understand and debate secularization processes, the intersection of religion in social identity formation, the role of religion in cultural processes of placemaking, and issues of religion in political geography. Geographers of religion are contributing to current conversations and challenges in race, gender, sexuality, age, migration studies, critical geopolitics, global development studies, political ecology, hauntological approaches, post-secularization, piety movements, evangelicalisms, and public religions. Religion has thus progressed beyond being an object of study or subject of inquiry in geography, but a way by which to practice human geography critically.

We are interested in papers and sessions that will push these emerging conversations further.  Specific topics that we encourage incluude:

• Gender, religion, and sexuality
• Youth, childhood, and religion
• Religion and migration
• Critical geopolitics, critical development studies, and religion
• Religion and post-humanist approaches
• Debating approaches to religion and the environment: cultural geography and political ecology
• Debating the post-secular
• Islamist/post-Islamist (geo)politics
• Geographies of evangelicalisms
• Geographies of race and religion
• Geographies of religion in Latin America
• Geographies of ‘Asian’ religions