Call for papers: Special Issue of Secularism & Nonreligion: Intersectionality and Power
Guest Editors: Penny Edgell, Evan Stewart, and Jacqui Frost, University of Minnesota
The past 30 years has seen a renewed interest in scholarship on secularism and non-religion, fostered by a variety of factors, including: the decline of religiosity and the visibility of “new atheist” groups and spokespersons in the United States and Europe, critiques of Western bias in scholarly secularization accounts, and growing awareness of the complexity and variety of non-religious identities, experiences, and movements across social contexts. This work shows the non-religious exist in sizable numbers when considered as a group, but has also done a remarkable job of highlighting the diversity and contextual embeddedness of the beliefs and practices of nonreligious individuals, the variety of secular organizations, and perceptions of the nonreligious.
We see a pressing need for a more robust consideration of intersectionality: how do secular identities intersect with other identities? How are secular identities, organizations, and discourses embedded within relations of power? For example, current scholarship focuses on the “gender gap” in religious involvement; an intersectional approach might consider how norms of religiosity are differentially enforced across genders, or what dimensions of masculinity allow for different expressions of secularity. For a special issue of Secularism & Nonreligion, we invite research articles and analytic book reviews concerned with the intersectionality of secularity with other social locations and structures of power in society. This could include a wide range of topics including discussions about stratification along lines of race, gender, or class, analyses of institutional dynamics that determine when secular perspectives are privileged and when they are marginalized, or accounts of how individuals and groups navigate secularism and nonreligion in relation to the rest of their social lives or organizational practices. Though our editorial perspective is predominantly informed by sociology, we invite contributions from a wide range of social science subfields and methodological approaches.
All manuscripts (7-10k words), research notes (2.5-6.5k words), and analytic book reviews (2,000 words) will undergo the double blind peer review process. General formatting and author guidelines can be found here:
http://www.secularismandnonreligion.org/about/submissions
The deadline for submission is August 15th, 2015. Please submit manuscripts in a Microsoft Word document or PDF file to Penny Edgell ([email protected]).
