REMINDER: CFP: Critical Theory for Political Theology, Keywords

What tools from critical theory are useful for scholarship in political theology, or more generally for thinking in new ways about the connections between religion and politics? Are there keywords from the fields of feminist theory, queer theory, decolonial studies, Black studies, or Indigenous studies that could enrich discussions of political theology?

While political theology is increasingly understood as an interdisciplinary field, bringing together scholars of religious traditions and scholars from across the humanities theorizing the connections between religious, political, and secular ideas and practices, the reservoir of contemporary theory and philosophy from which the field draws has often remained relatively shallow, centered on figures from European philosophy such as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Jacques Derrida. The Critical Theory for Political Theology 2.0 series of essays, published on the Political Theology Network website in 2021, sought to expand and enrich the field by focusing on individual theorists; the 2022 series of essays, for which we seek proposals, aims to do similar work by focusing on keywords.

We invite proposals for brief essays (1500-2000 words) accompanied by annotated bibliographies that introduce keywords from Black studies, decolonial studies, queer theory, feminist theory, Indigenous studies, or other fields to political theology. While we encourage essays that approach this task creatively, we expect each essay to include a brief introduction to the keyword, suggestions about how it might contribute to discussions of political theology, and challenges the keyword might encounter when confronting questions of religion. We envision essays on such keywords as abolition, affect, archive, biopolitics, Blackness, blood, body, coloniality, diaspora, dispossession, extraction, genocide, intersectionality, land, mourning, neoliberalism, performativity, queer, relationality, revolution, settler colonialism, temporality, trans, undercommons, and university. We welcome other suggestions as well.

Curated by an editorial collective, essays in this series will be available open access on the Political Theology Network website. We may explore the possibility of a future print publication. Please send proposals including the keyword you would like to write about, a paragraph describing your approach, and a couple lines describing your expertise to Alex Dubilet (aleksey.dubilet@vanderbilt.edu) and Vincent Lloyd (vlloyd@villanova.edu). Please send your proposals by September 20, 2021. The brief essays will be due starting December 15, 2021.

Editorial Collective:

Lilith Acadia, Assistant Professor of Literary Theory, National Taiwan University

An Yountae, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Cal State Northridge

*Alex Dubilet, Assistant Professor of English, Vanderbilt University

Lucia Hulsether, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Skidmore College

Dana Lloyd, Assistant Professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies, Villanova University

*Vincent Lloyd, Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies, Villanova University

Revital Madar, Postdoctoral Scholar, European University Institute

Andrew Prevot, Associate Professor of Theology, Boston College

Marika Rose, Senior Lecturer in Philosophical Theology, University of Winchester

Rafael Vizcaíno, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University

*: conveners