Call for Contributions: (Post)secular

Dr. Silke Horstkotte and Dr. James Hodkinson from Warwick University ask for proposals for contributions to the conference event "(Post)secular: Imagining faith in contemporary cultures."  The deadline for proposals is 15 November 2016.

[H]ave we ever fully been secular? Is post-secularism a coherent intellectual-cultural movement, or yet another fleeting epochal descriptor? And has religion really “returned”, or have the media simply become more attuned to its renewed prevalence as an identity marker? The conference event pursues these questions through a series of encounters between scholarly discussion and artistic intervention. (Post)secular takes up Charles Taylor’s argument that secularity entails not only the secularization of public spaces and the decline of belief and practice, but also a new set of conditions under which both belief and unbelief occur, a new context in which all search and questioning about the moral and spiritual must proceed. By bracketing the (post), we aim to sidestep the unproductive periodization paradigm, opening up to the breadth and variety of cultural forms through which ideas about faith are articulated (and indeed shaped) in the present.

Planned for 8-10 June 2017, (Post)secular will involve a rolling programme of academic panels and roundtables, as well as musical performances and film screenings by established and up-and-coming musicians and filmmakers from the UK, Ireland and Germany. Held at the University of Warwick, Coventry Cathedral and other local venues, we will seek to engage academics, artistic practitioners, policy makers and the public. We invite proposals and suggestions for artistic/performance contributions, as well as abstracts for papers and panels covering literary, film and media studies, musicology, visual studies and art history, theology and religious studies, philosophy and the social and political sciences.

Complete call

Silke Horstkotte holds a Marie Curie Research Fellowship for her project "Beyond the Secular" in which she studies

changing assumptions about secularity and religion in contemporary Germany through the lens of literary fiction, poetry, theatre and film. Analyzing texts by authors from diverse religious, secular, and ethnic backgrounds, the project "Beyond the secular" considers aesthetic narrativizations of religion and the secular in dialogue with relevant social and cultural environments and as catalysts of the on-going de-secularization of modernity.

She writes about her project in the blog BeSec.