2025 Conference Call for Papers
2025 ISSRNC Conference – Call for Papers
Crossing Borders, Transgressing Boundaries: Religion, Migration, and Climate Change
June 23 – 27, 2025 | University of California, Santa Barbara (USA)
Submission Deadline Extended: Sept 30, 2024
Over the past decade, the impacts of anthropogenic climate change have become immediate and severe. Scientific models predict that these effects will intensify as we approach and exceed the threshold of 1.5° C above the pre-industrial average global temperature and other projected planetary boundaries. The struggle of living beings around the world (human and otherwise) to adapt to rapid changes raises urgent questions about migration and mobility, questions which are deeply interconnected to social, political, and religious controversies over physical borders and ethical or moral boundaries. Yet, these projected boundaries are themselves “imagined” by humans, raising additional questions about how they are constructed. In that sense, “planetary boundaries” share something in common with other kinds of borders: they are human articulations of where the limits of one kind of life ends and another begins. These discourses are often mired in Western-centric and colonial ideologies that silence the lived realities and knowledge systems of non-Western peoples and nonhuman animals. Moreover, these discourses often fail to consider the long geologic history of the earth and the various thresholds that have been exceeded in that history. Such discourses function as a means of adjudicating which lives are worthy, where, and on what terms.
This call invites scholars to critically assess and rethink how we imagine, control, and defend borders and boundaries—and relatedly, how migration shapes, and is shaped by, religious and ecological lives and worlds—in a time of rapid environmental change.
