The European Forum for the Study of Religion and the Environment

in association with the 
Lincoln Theological Institute

and the 
Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence

is pleased to announce its
sixth international conference 
to be held remotely by Zoom


RELIGION, MATERIALISM AND ECOLOGY REDUX!  #EFSREVI 

 Friday 14 May to Saturday 15 May 2021

REGISTRATION IS OPEN

CONFIRMED PLENARY SPEAKERS

Rachel Armstrong (Newcastle University, UK) 

Architecting Zoë: On Haunting Homes

Whitney Bauman (Florida International University, and Berlin)

Developing a Critical Planetary Romanticism (CPR) for the Earth

Bruno Latour (Sciences Po, Paris) 

Down to earth as an occasion to review the meaning of incarnation

 

Erik Swyngedouw (University of Manchester, UK)  

Interrupting the Anthropo-(Ob)Scene:  The Depoliticized Politics of the Anthropocene as Immuno-biopolitical Fantasy      

Linn Marie Tonstad (Yale University)

Not-knowing (in) the flesh

PANELS

Mary Keller, Yianna Liatsos, Carol Wayne White: States of Smallness

Richard Carp, Todd LeVasseur, Sarah Pike, Paul PuleQueering materialism and Practices of (Climate) Repair

SHORT PAPERS

A list of short papers with abstracts is available HERE.

The draft REPEAT DRAFT short papers schedule is HERE.

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

The conference programme is HERE.

#EFSREVI

Troubled by time zones? Try THIS 

 

Conference Administrator: Alex Shaw  EFSRE@manchester.ac.uk  

Conference Chair: Peter Scott  EFSRE@manchester.ac.uk

 

CONFERENCE THEME

Because of changes brought about by, among other things, a warming climate, there has been a revival in materialism. Although there is little agreement on what ‘materialism’ means, this revival is certainly a reaction against a widespread instrumentalism regarding ‘dead matter’. At the very least, its resurgence relates to the return of non-human nature—if indeed nature ever left. The core aim of many of these materialisms is to understand matter in more animated and active ways—a sort of Romantic turn or an undoing of the postmodern end of nature. Options here include the “new materialism” (Bennett, Barad), speculative realism (Morton), and ‘actor-network theory’ (Latour). This has led to many objections from the ‘old’ materialists (i.e. Marxists) who understand nature more in terms of a factor in production and may be more cautious about ascribing agency to nature (Malm). There have also been constructive developments regarding materialism within Marxism such as metabolic rift theory (John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burkett). Feminist theorists (Haraway, for example) have been addressing the issue of materialism already especially in relation to animal and technology studies. At issue are a range of issues, including hierarchy, the nature of relationality, the relation between nature and society, human and other agencies, and ‘world picture’. The conference will aim to explore some of these new developments, including how materialist issues impinge upon religious traditions and the extent to which religions are already materialist and so have a creative contribution to make to debates about ecological materialisms. 

 

For and on behalf of the Conference Committee