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OP26


Thinking Infrastructurally About Religion (and Religiously about Infrastructure) 
Convenors:
Thomas Fibiger (University of Aarhus)
Benjamin Kirby (University of Bayreuth)
Matteo Benussi (Ca' Foscari University of Venice)
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Format:
Panel
Location:
Omega room
Sessions:
Thursday 7 September, -, Friday 8 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Vilnius

Short Abstract:

This double panel sets out to "think infrastructurally" about religion and to "think religiously" about infrastructure. It explores how doing so might transform received understandings of religion. The second part of the panel focuses on religious infrastructure across Indian Ocean space.

Long Abstract:

Material studies of religion have drawn a significant measure of attention to spiritually-charged objects and technological devices. Less often have they foregrounded the composition and workings of more extended technological arrangements relevant to religious life. This double panel addresses this gap by examining the relationship between religion and infrastructure, and in doing so engages with the multi-disciplinary "infrastructure turn" (Addie et al. 2020).

The panel is not focused exclusively on prototypical infrastructures (e.g., electrical grids, roads), but also social and technical arrangements that act as infrastructure despite not being formally designated or designed as such (Lawhon et al. 2018). A given arrangement acts as infrastructure when it functions to make other arrangements possible: it is a "second-order" system (Chu 2014). Infrastructures are also characterised by their "background-ability": unlike a tool or device, an infrastructure can be cognitively backgrounded as part of the practice that it enables (Shove 2017). This makes infrastructures especially generative sites of analysis with respect to conceptualising the often-overlooked processes through which collective religious life is (re)configured.

Panellists have been invited to draw on empirically-grounded research in order to "think infrastructurally" (Chu 2014) about religion, and to "think religiously" about infrastructure (Kirby and Hölzchen f.c.). Contributions will not necessarily focus on infrastructures that enable explicitly "religious" practices, such as those of veneration and worship; religious arrangements may act as infrastructure for practices that are not religiously marked at all.

The second part of the panel focuses specifically on religious infrastructure within and across the Indian Ocean, building in part on an ongoing collaborative research project on Dawoodi Bohras. Panellists will explore the effects of infrastructure projects on the coherence of transregional religious communities in the Indian Ocean region, on their relations with different nation states where community members reside, and on how they experience and practice religion.

Accepted papers:

Session 1 Thursday 7 September, 2023, -
Session 2 Friday 8 September, 2023, -