Nonreligion and the Secular: New Horizons for Multidisciplinary Research

Goldsmiths University, London, UK

4-6 July 2012

**Registration is now open**

**Deadline for abstract submission is 27 April 2012**

               

Conveners: Lois Lee (ll317@cam.ac.uk), Stacey Gutkowski (stacey.gutkowski@kcl.ac.uk), and Stephen Bullivant (stephen.bullivant@smuc.ac.uk)

Conference Coordinator: Katie Aston (k.aston@gold.ac.uk)

Following decades of neglect, the academic study of nonreligion has grown rapidly in the past five years. The primary aim of this conference is to bring together scholars across a range of academic disciplines (sociology, anthropology, theology, political science, psychology, history, international relations, area studies) to begin to untangle the confused and individually contested concepts of nonreligion and the secular. Is nonreligion a subcategory of the secular or vice versa? How do the two terms structure one another? What are the practical and theoretical implications of the concepts, such as they are and/or in alternative formulations? The aim of this international conference is to contribute to addressing this lacuna.  While discussions of nonreligion and the secular have been running largely in parallel, they are potentially mutually enriching topics with significant bearing outside of the academy. This conference will consolidate the achievements already made over the past five years by nonreligion scholars and forge new, multidisciplinary dialogue between these researchers and those primarily working with the concept of the secular.

This conference will bring together a range of internationally renowned scholars, including keynote speakers Gracie Davie (Exeter), Callum Brown (Dundee), Monika Wohlrab-Sahr (Leipzig), and Humeira Iqtidar (King’s College London).

The conference engages with a historical moment in which forms of religion and nonreligion have increasingly asserted themselves in the public sphere, in non-Western as well as Western settings. In the case of radical Islamism and New Atheism, such assertions have had powerful, sometimes inflammatory and divisive affect. This urgent wider social and political context demonstrates the urgency of a reasoned, global, scholarly contribution, aimed at further theorising and conceptualising nonreligion and the secular, individually and in relation to each other.

Further details and a programme will be published in late May 2012.

The deadline for abstract submission (250 words max) is 27 April 2012. A full call for papers can be found here. Please send your abstract together with a short biographical note to Katie Aston at k.aston@gold.ac.uk

Registration is now open with the following conference rates:

Full conference (waged) £145
Full conference (unwaged) £110
Day registration, (waged) £65
Day registration, (unwaged) £45

Please note, a late registration fee ­ of £30 for full conference registration and £10 for day
rates ­ will be added after 17 May.

Please download, complete and return the Registration Form, NSRN conference 2012.doc to k.aston@gold.ac.uk

For details of accommodation in the local area, please see the following link