‘Elephantshit Jobs’

Everyday settings, discourses and bodies are continuously in transformation – and this pertains also to practices of religion, spirituality, non-religion, and secularity . This conference therefore asks how religion is embodied and practiced in transformative everyday settings. Inspired by the turn towards lived religion in religious studies (e.g. McGuire 2008), we want to bring the notion of lived religion in conversation with three different topics: i) material religion; ii) gender and religion; iii) sensemaking. These three topics emerge from a threefold aim: first, this conference wants to present various accounts of how religion is understood, materialized and lived by various individuals and communities. Secondly, it explores how this takes place in everyday activities such as sexuality, work, education, sports, as well as through gendered ways of being in the world. Finally, by employing bottom up research approaches, the conference pleads for conceptualizations of religion that take seriously what is happening in everyday life understandings, practices and forms of embodiment, but always in relation to larger historical and sociopolitical discourses and realities.

The three conference topics will be introduced on Day 1 of the conference by three lecturers who have showed the relevance of including these lenses in their work: David Geiringer (Queen Mary University of London), Katie Gaddini (University College London), and Mark de Rond (University of Cambridge, UK). Each theme corresponds to a panel at Day 2 of the conference, in which scholars are invited to present their current work.