Call for Participation
Graduate Forum Everyday Religion: Materiality and Sensibility
UIN Sayyid Ali Rahmatullah Tulungagung, 28-30 July 2025
Over the last decades, scholars of Islam in Indonesia and elsewhere have paid increasing attention to the everyday Muslim experiences while moving beyond conventional binaries including elite and popular religion, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, or modern and traditional frameworks. Building on these impulses, this Graduate Forum focuses on sensory experiences and material cultures as productive sites to investigate how Muslim subjectivities and identities are constructed, maintained, and contested in the contemporary world.
Together, we seek to explore how the sensory and the material interact with religious thought and practice among Indonesian Studies. While many studies recognise the importance of these aspects, there is still a gap in understanding how they specifically impact individual and group religious experiences, especially in a complex socio-cultural setting influenced by globalization and local traditions.
The 1st Graduate Forum is a joint collaboration between UIN Sayyid Ali Rahmatullah Tulungggung, UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta, Universitas Brawijaya and Leiden University. It invites MA students/prospective Ph.D. and early Ph.D. students to submit research abstract (either in Bahasa Indonesia or English) across different cultural contexts on related topics:
- Production, circulation and engagement with religious materials
- Religious sensibilities and experiences
- The lives of materials, sensescapes and mediatisation
- The poetics and politics of material culture
- Ontologies and ontological turns
- Bodies and embodiment
- Social life of religious things and soundscape
- Performing piety and educational practises
- Sound and Religion
- Dress, nudity and orders
- The materiality of scripture and symbolic meaning
Please send your short CV and abstract (max. 250 words) to [email protected] by 25 June 2025. Only selected participants (announced on 1 July 2025) will be invited to participate in the Graduate Forum. Invited participants must submit a tentative draft of research proposal/notes by 15 July 2025.
No registration fee is required for participation. The committee will provide three days accommodation during the forum for selected participants.