Wellbeing, Harm, and Religion: Religious Studies Doctoral Conference 2021

Domů
česko
Brno
Wellbeing, Harm, and Religion: Religious Studies Doctoral Conference 2021

Wellbeing, Harm, and Religion: Religious Studies Doctoral Conference 2021 Applicants will receive the final decision by the end of May 2021.

The fifth annual doctoral conference in religious studies introduces:

WELLBEING, HARM, AND RELIGION
September 9th-11th, 2021, Brno, Czech Republic

Specific ideas about what constitutes harm and wellbeing have been historically shaped by different religious traditions considerably. Throughout the history of the human species, illnesses, injuries, and diseases were often dealt with through religio

us rituals, as evidenced from the earliest Sumerian incantations from the 26th century BC to the contemporary evangelical faith healing. Some ritualized acts incorporate what can be seen as harm or violence, like genital mutilations or flesh hook insertions. Nevertheless, these same acts can be also perceived as leading towards wellbeing (of community, individual, deity, etc.). Alternatively, consider other practices more directly aimed at the wellbeing of mind and soul, that may even result in a feedback loop affecting the physical body, like shamanic trance induction, baptism, or meditation. But not only rituals – embracing of religious worldview as an interpretative framework may also substantially affect one’s wellbeing. Different conceptions of harm and wellbeing derived from different religious traditions retain their relevance in many locales across the globe even today, as they did in history. They intertwine(d) with “secular” medical practices; religious actors can formulate stances towards modern medical technologies, like vaccination and blood transfusion; and religion sometimes articulates alternative theories about the nature and origin of various diseases and about their
treatment. With this conference, we aim to create a platform for the study of the intersections amongst religion, health, and diverse cultural conceptions
of harm and wellbeing. We welcome applications from PhD students, as
well as advanced Master’s students from all fields and across disciplines of humanities, social and life sciences. Abstracts, no longer than 250 words, should be submitted via our website WHeRE2021.phil.muni.cz by 30th April 2021. For further information, please see WHeRE2021.phil.muni.cz, or contact us at [email protected]. Organized by the:

Department for the Study of Religions
Masaryk University
https://religionistika.phil.muni.cz/

Center for Religious Studies
Central European University
https://religion.ceu.edu

Department of Philosophy and Religious studies
University of Pardubice
https://kfr.upce.cz/

Department of Philosophy and Religious studies
Charles University
http://ufar.ff.cuni.cz/

07/02/2022

Dear colleagues and friends, it has been a while since our last post but, the waiting has borne sweet fruits! We are happy to announce another year of the doctoral conference in Religious Studies bearing the name Transformations of Religions in Times of Crises: Spiritual Alienation and Rethinking of Ethics. 🥳

We would like to invite you to follow its FB page 1stCESAR2022 where you will find more information about the conference. Also, check out the event and kindly share it with your friends and colleagues. See you all in Pardubice.. 😁

Cheers..!

16/09/2021

Dear all!

Our conference has ended, and we would like to thank you for such a good atmosphere, fascinating talks, and inspiring discussions. We enjoyed all the time spent with you! 🥰

Besides the official program, we were amused by all the free-time activities, from the guided tour to the brewery excursion, where we already discussed the following year‘s gathering. 🍻💪

Stay tuned for what we will prepare next! 🙋

10/09/2021

Social evening is in full swing! 🤩

Today’s contributions were a blast and now we are enjoying the evening with the fabulous Beetroot catering food. Thanks to the awesome Šárka! 🙏🏼

We are looking forward to tomorrow’s program!🌿

08/09/2021

THE LAST POST BEFORE IT BEGINS!

Our dear participants, do you know where to find the conference?
Here is a map 🧐

For those who are not registered but would like to join us online, it is possible to click on the zoom link whenever you want. Contact us here (via messenger or [email protected]), and we will send the link to your e-mail.

See you there! 🤩🙋‍♀️

04/09/2021

Another free and voluntary activity announcement! 🥳 After the closing keynote lecture by Michal Pagis on Saturday, there will be an excursion to a local brewery 🍻 at 6:30 PM. Our host will be EFI Pivovar brewery and restaurant close to the city centre. Guided tour, tasting of local craft beers and a dinner included. 😋 Possibility of a vegetarian menu is a matter of course. 😎 We are looking forward to conclude the conference with good beer and tasty food with all of you. 😄

24/08/2021

Have you already read the program? If so, you probably noticed that the first free-time activity is a guided tour in the center of Brno! 🤩
The walk is voluntary and completely for free. We’re going to the city center together at 18:30, the walk with professional commentary takes about 2 hours.
Religious landmarks included! 🥳
Will you take the walk with us? Are you interested in some sight in particular? Let us know! 👇

19/08/2021

Dear all!
Are you curious what does the conference program look like? We’ve uploaded the program on the WHeRE web page: https://religionistika.phil.muni.cz/where2021/program
But you can check it also here 😊
We hope you will enjoy all the speakers and their interesting topics 🤩
Don‘t forget to follow our FB to see what free-time wonders we prepared for you! 👀🍻

05/05/2021

🌿 We are postponing the active participation deadline for those of you who did not manage to send us their abstract yet. The new deadline is May 16th. We are looking forward to hearing from you. ;)

26/04/2021

Our third and last keynote speaker is Radek Kundt (Masaryk University, Czech Republic). He is a scholar of religion that uses methods of experimental anthropology and psychology and employs evolutionary models to study religious behavior in terms of intragroup cooperation. His monography "Contemporary Evolutionary Theories of Culture and the Study of Religion" was published in 2015 in Bloomsbury Academic.

Concerning wellbeing, harm, and religion, what will he be sharing with us? Check out his annotation and see! 🌿👇

𝗘𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗲𝘅𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗲 𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗼𝗻 𝗽𝗵𝘆𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝘀𝘆𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵

Extreme rituals that involve bodily mutilation entail significant physiological (e.g., injury, infection) and psychological (e.g., distress, trauma) risks, yet practitioners often claim that they convey health benefits. Tackling the evolutionary puzzle of extreme rituals and their potential fitness benefits, this talk will report the results from a collaborative investigation of health outcomes of participation in the Kavadi performed by Tamils in Mauritius. Combining ethnographic observations and psychophysiological measurements over a two-month period, we monitored physiological responses of ritual participants and a control group and obtained assessments of perceived health and quality of life. Compared to a control group, performance of this demanding ordeal had no detrimental effects on physiological health but was associated with improvements in psychological well-being. Furthermore, individuals who reported chronic health problems sought more painful levels of engagement which were associated with greater improvements in psychological well-being. We suggest several bottom-up and top-down mechanisms facilitating these effects including self-signaling (i.e., effects of past experience in undertaking pain on the future health self-evaluation) and placebo (i.e., effects of cultural expectations in the ritual healing power).

20/04/2021

Dear all,

This post is of a technical matter - we have noticed that on our website (https://religionistika.phil.muni.cz/where2021) there was a wrong email address stated. If you were experiencing issues with sending us an email, it was probably because of this reason. Sorry for the inconvenience. Everything is fixed now.

We are looking forward to meeting you all!

P.S. Have YOU sent us your abstract yet?

08/04/2021

Another keynote speaker sharing his knowledge with us is Andrea de Antoni (Kyoto University, Japan). He is an anthropologist investigating experiences with spirits, with a focus on bodily perceptions and affect, and an author of "Going to Hell in Contemporary Japan: Feeling Landscapes of the Afterlife, Othering, Memory and Materiality" (Routledge, forthcoming). His present research examines spirit possession and exorcism in contemporary Japan and Italy.

Sounds interesting? Take a look at the annotation of his lecture! 🌿👇

𝗦𝗽𝗶𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱:
𝘈𝘯 𝘈𝘯𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘙𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘏𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘈𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘈𝘧𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘈𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘛𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘯𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘦𝘴

In this talk I propose some methodological reflections, to understand experiences of religious healing from the perspective of socio-cultural anthropology, with a focus on spirit possession. While relying on ethnographic data gathered through fieldwork in contemporary Japan and Italy, I suggest that a focus on how spirits emerge through possession and their becomings offers a useful path to comparison and argue for a more emergent and practice-based approach to spirit entities. I suggest a focus on the body moving-in-the-world or, as I prefer, ‘feeling with’ the world, as central to understand how spirit beings emerge through practice and how such emergence can relate to experiences of healing. In this lecture, I focus especially on two ideas. The first, ‘affective affordances,’ indicates material affordances that, in the interaction with enskilled bodies, can elicit the particular feelings through which spirit perceptions and realities emerge. The second, ‘affective technologies,’ points at configurations of practices, actions, or processes that elicit and allow the emergence of specific feelings by opening possibilities for encounters between lived, perceiving bodies and certain affordances. I argue that an analysis of experiences with spirits through this focus on situated bodies ‘feeling with’ human and non-human actors through practice, can be useful for a novel understanding of spirit emergence and ontogenesis, spirit possession and religious healing.

30/03/2021

One of the keynote speakers you can look forward to is Michal Pagis (Bar-Ilan University, Israel). She is a sociologist studying the growing popularity of techniques of self-transformation in contemporary post-industrial culture and the connection between spirituality and popular psychology, the author of "Inward: Vipassana Meditation and the Embodiment of the Self" (University of Chicago Press).

Read the annotation of her WHeRE 2021 lecture! 🌿👇

𝗥𝗲-𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗽𝘆

In most of human history religion and therapy were intertwined. It is mainly with modernity that psychological therapy evolved into a separate value sphere that is based on a secular, dis-enchanted ethos. Scholars of the therapeutic ethos have claimed that its evident popularity represents a triumph, arguing that the therapeutic replaces religion as the new sacred canopy that offers frames of meaning, technologies of self and forms of authority. This triumph is evident in the growing “psychologization” of contemporary religion, as religious spheres adopt the therapeutic ethos in order to remain relevant. This story of triumph, however, ignores the opposite trajectory, in which psychologists are turning to religious traditions in the hope to find ways to invigorate therapy. This process reveals a growing disappointment from the academic and secular versions of psychology, leading to the attempt to re-enchant therapy. Based on ethnographic research in workshops, retreats and courses oriented to licensed therapists that integrate elements from Buddhist or Jewish traditions into clinical practice, we examine what religion-inspired psychologists find to be missing from their profession, why they need religion in order to change contemporary therapy, and how they adapt religious/spiritual ideas and practices so these could be used in their professional work. We illustrate how the project of re-enchanting therapy positions itself against the hyper-individualistic spirit of contemporary psychology by integrating ethics, morality and community back into the therapeutic framework.

Adresa

Arna Nováka 1
Brno

Internetová stránka

https://religionistika.phil.muni.cz/where2021

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