The 2014 AAR/WR conference will be held at Loyola University Marymount on March 7-9. The Call for Proposals will be posted by August.

Information on the 2013 program, hosted by Arizona State University, is available through the links below:


2013 AAR Western Region Annual Conference

Religion in Public Life

Click here for the 2013 Conference Program

For this year's conference theme we take a cue from the 2008 AAR publication, "The Religion Major and Liberal Education." That white paper tied its vision of a robust future for religious studies to the recognition on many fronts that religion is "an inescapable part" of public life around the globe. How do we in the discipline of religious studies represent that public dimension of religion?

The calls for papers from the 20+ units making up the western regional AAR take up this question in a variety of ways. Some focus on controversies related to religion and politics in the western United States (e.g. same sex marriage or immigration reform), others turn to other regions of the world (e.g. the "Arab Spring") or to historical antecedents (e.g. the Jesuits' entry into China). Topics raised are richly diverse, including ecology, pluralism, the current "Mormon moment," terrorism, popular culture, among others.

The units are asking scholars and teachers of religion to reflect on how we frame questions and analyses about the ways religion plays out in various public settings. Do we, for instance, tend to privilege particular public expressions of religion as normative or paradigmatic, or even problematic? How is our work shaped by the institutions in which we teach and their calls to, for example, cultivate a critical tolerance of diverse religions or to help students form a religiously informed public voice? By what criteria do we select among traditions, texts, histories, institutions, events, and figures to develop analyses of religion's intersection with politics? And perhaps location does matter; how do distinctive features of our region (California, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii, and the Pacific Islands) inform how we approach this theme, and how should it be different from the approach developed by colleagues in other parts of this country and/or other regions in the world?