The Religion Graduate Organization and the Department of Religion at Syracuse University announce the 2018 Graduate Student Conference Flourish and Decay: Exploring Religion in Process on Friday, April 13th, 2018.

**The deadline for submissions has been extended to feb. 3**

Flour·ish: [‘flǝriSH] (n., v.) growth and development in a good environment; a gesture or to gesture in such a way that attracts attention.

De·cay: [dǝ͘‘kā] ‘(n., v.) to rot organically or the process of decomposition; to deteriorate; to fall into a state of disrepair. Rotten matter. A gradual decline of quality.

This conference proposes the terms “flourish” and “decay” as entry points through which to further understand how religion emerges and envelops within past, present, and future worlds.

Both flourish and decay can operate as either overarching metaphors of change, transformation, and fluctuation or as literal descriptions of cycles of growth, consumption, and loss. We embrace the capaciousness of these terms and encourage graduate students to think innovatively through them as an opportunity to explore religion in process. We welcome diversity in topics, theoretical approaches, and methodologies from all academic fields and disciplines across a broad range of histories, geographies, and religious traditions.

Keynote: Kathryn Lofton, Yale University

Papers and panels might engage the following (but not limited to) themes of:

Fame, thriving, and prosperity
Politics, conflict, and resistance
Misogynoir, toxic masculinity, gender
Afrofuturism, critical race theory
Indigenous futurism, de/colonization practices
Ruins, cities, empire, and war
Futurity, millenarianism, apocalypticism and utopianism
Community, class, geography, place, space
Pollution in texts, bodies, environments, landscapes
Disaster, trauma, toxicity, and recovery
Life, biopolitics, necropolitics, health, governmentality
Aesthetics, beauty, and the grotesque
Precarity, neoliberalism, late capitalism, globalism, nationalism
Environmentalism, the Anthropocene, climate change, waste
Technology, transhumanism, robotics, and artificial intelligence
The viral and the virtual, affect theory
Death, funerary and burial rites
Temporalities, histories


Please submit a short abstract (350 words for papers; 500 words for panels) and a CV in PDF format to: SUReligionConference@gmail.com by February 3, 2018.
religionconference.syr.edu