Call for Papers - Rituals in Rupture: Everyday Religion and the Politics of Instability in Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia Council (SEAC) — Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (JSEAS) Initiative
Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference 2026 (AAS2026 @ Vancouver)
Submission deadline: July 22, 2025

The Southeast Asia Council (SEAC) of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) is seeking paper proposals from up-and-coming scholars to join a “SEAC-JSEAS” panel on the topic of “Rituals in Rupture: Everyday Religion and the Politics of Instability in Southeast Asia” We seek to recruit early career scholars, including graduate students, independent scholars and untenured faculty, with preference for scholars from underfunded institutions in Late Developing Countries (LDC) in Southeast Asia (see below for eligibility). Accepted paper proposals will form a panel for presentation and inclusion in the 2026 Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, to be held in Vancouver, B.C., Canada from March 12-15, 2026. Presenters will receive partial financial assistance from the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies to attend the Annual Conference and meetings.

Panel Topic Description

What shapes religious and belief practices in the everyday lives of Southeast Asians, particularly in times of unrest and destabilizing disruption? How do faith, ritual, morality, and spiritual authority circulate across different spheres of life, within families, communities, workplaces, schools, and places of worship? How do people draw upon, contest, or reinterpret religious and spiritual frameworks in their ordinary activities—especially when those routines are interrupted by political instability, social fragmentation, or sudden crisis? 

In Southeast Asia, religion and belief are deeply embedded in the region’s social, political, and affective life. Yet in recent years, increasing turbulence—ranging from political upheavals and environmental crises to economic precarity and social polarization—has reshaped how people engage with the sacred. These conditions of destabilization have amplified anxieties, reconfigured moral communities, and produced both new solidarities and sharper exclusions. While state institutions often attempt to regulate or define official religion, lived experiences of faith stretch far beyond such boundaries. Religious organizations, kinship networks, informal economies, and ancestral traditions shape complex moral terrains and overlapping systems of discipline, belonging, and care.

This panel invites scholars to explore the entanglements of religion, belief, and everyday life in Southeast Asia, especially in times of instability. We are particularly interested in how individuals and communities negotiate moral authority, spiritual legitimacy, and collective identity, whether through institutionalized religion or vernacular forms of belief. We welcome contributions that consider how belief systems respond to or are transformed by turbulence, and how they intersect with gender, class, ethnicity, migration, and generational change. We also encourage work that addresses tensions between official doctrine and everyday ethics, and the creative, sometimes resistant, ways in which belief is reimagined in precarious times.

This panel calls for papers that examine how religion and belief are lived, contested, and transformed in the everyday lives of Southeast Asians, particularly in moments of turbulence, disruption, and social unrest. Rather than focusing solely on institutionalized or state-sanctioned forms of religion, this panel encourages contributions that explore how spiritual and moral authority is negotiated through everyday practices, vernacular beliefs, and informal networks of care and discipline.

The aim is to foreground the intersections between faith, instability, and the moral imagination in Southeast Asia by asking how belief systems respond to, mediate, or are reshaped by broader conditions of political uncertainty, economic precarity, and social fragmentation. Papers may engage with how gender, class, ethnicity, migration, and generational change intersect with religious and moral worlds. At the same time, this panel invites critical reflection on the tensions between official religious doctrine and the ethics of everyday life, and how belief is mobilized in ways that are creative, adaptive, and at times resistant.

In doing so, this panel seeks to expand conversations around religion and belief beyond doctrinal boundaries and institutional narratives, and to consider how the sacred is made and remade in precarious times.

Eligibility and Selection Criteria

We seek papers by Southeast Asian scholars who are early career scholars, advanced graduate students (currently writing dissertations based on original field or archival research), or untenured faculty members (including tenure-track assistant professors, adjuncts, and lecturers, or the approximate equivalent based on the academic tradition from which the scholar is coming). Applicants may be currently enrolled as students in, or employed by, any institution of higher education in the world.Preference may be given to students or faculty currently based at underfunded institutions in Late Developing Countries (LDC) in Southeast Asia. Please note that the definition of LDC used by the AAS excludes the following Asian countries: Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Republic of China (Taiwan), Republic of Korea (South Korea), and Singapore.

The primary criteria for selection will be the quality of the paper proposals as well as the way selected proposals work together as a viable panel.

1. The panel is intended to be a Southeast Asia-focused panel. Submissions that do not substantively address issues pertaining to the region will not be considered.

2. The selected panelists will be expected to attend the conference in person and comply with the deadline for paper submissions.

3. Paper presenters must submit their papers to the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies.

4. Neither published papers nor papers under review can be accepted to the JSEAS-sponsored panels. Moreover, scholars may not submit the same paper proposal to both Rising Voices and JSEAS-sponsored panels.

To submit a paper proposal, please submit the following, in the order listed below, all in a SINGLEMicrosoft Word file or PDF document, by July 22, 2025:

1. Applicant’s Name, affiliation, and contact information, clearly indicating applicant’s current country of residence.

2. Paper abstract. 250 words in the format of the standard AAS paper proposal.

3. Brief bio-sketch of 200-300 words describing current and recent scholarly positions, a brief sentence or two about current research, and any significant publications. The model for this should be the standard blurb one sees on a faculty or graduate student website.

4. Current curriculum vitae. Maximum 4 pages

Please save the file with the following filename convention:

SEAC&JSEAS_Applicant’sFamilyName.doc

Completed applications should be sent to the attention of the SEAC-JSEAS Committee to the following address: seacjseascommittee@gmail.com by the 22 July 2025 deadline. Late submissions or submissions that do not follow the above instructions will not be considered. Applicants should confirm in their email that their paper has not been published or submitted for review elsewhere.

Source: https://www.asianstudies.org/call-for-papers-rituals-in-rupture-everyday-religion-and-the-politics-of-instability-in-southeast-asia/