SORAAAD’s 10th year of workshops, with the theme, "Representation and the Analytical Study of Religion" was interrupted by the COVID surge of early 2021, after talks by Richard Newton and Alana Vincent.
The workshop's events have been on hiatus and will, for now, continue online. SORAAAD will resume its focus on representation over the course of at least 2023-24 academic year.
Attention to representation in research design, including what factors into how we understand religion and conceive of what we should study, were among the workshop’s originating concerns. In its most basic terms, representation is a means of characterizing and accounting for elements in “a sample” from which we generalize in order to characterize phenomena.
Representation conjures simultaneously the need to address the manufacture and designation of alterity and normativity (SORAAAD, 2012 PDF) , to cultivate a capacity to chart arrays of human expression and activity, to recognize and rectify voids, and to allow this work to change how we compare, explain, and conceptualize (Long, 1995; Moultrie, 2017, Compton et. al, 2017, Garland-Thomson, 2015)
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