Call for Papers 2023

The schools of Divinity and Environment at Yale University invite you to the seventh annual Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology.

The theme of this year's conference, "Earth's Lamentation: Ecological Grief and the Paradox of Hope," invites participants to consider the necessity of lamentation and the complexity of hope in the face of climate change.

We encourage applications from graduate students and other rising voices in the fields of Religious Studies, Law & Policy, Philosophy, History, Environmental Studies, Gender and Race Studies, Art History and from other fields whose work orbits this year's conference topic. For the first time, the Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology is also pleased to accept creative and artistic submissions. The climate crisis is personal in its impact and complex in its solutions, and we are excited to welcome all ways of knowing and engaging.

We especially encourage applicants from historically underrepresented backgrounds to apply, and encourage interdisciplinary work across these topics to reflect the aims of this conference.

Possible topics of interest include:

1. How we can or should lament with the Earth as individuals and religious communities; how we can learn from, share in, and support diverse forms or traditions of grieving
2. The dual nature of Earth's grief (the dual pain of ecosystems and individuals from 1. human-imposed crises and 2. being forgotten or forsaken in this pain)
3. What it means for us to be both perpetrators and victims of ecological crisis at the same time (and who is included in "us")
4. Over-reliance on myths of resilience (ecological, individual, community)
5. Problems with deluded, "greenwashed," toxically positive, self-serving, and/or colonized hope; if (or how) religious traditions promote these false hopes
6. If (or how) radical hope can still be claimed in particular (religious and nonreligious) communities in the face of Earth's great ecological grief
7. The intersectional nature of grief: how the ecological crisis is mirrored and compounded by social, political, and economic crises related to race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.