What is the main theme of the ISSR 39th Conference?

The main theme of the conference is "Worlds at the brink: Religion, Performativity and Future-making."

When does the conference take place?

The conference is scheduled to begin in the middle of February and conclude towards the end of February.

International Society for the Sociology of Religion 39th Conference – Worlds at the brink: Religion, Performativity and Future‑making

Name: International Society for the Sociology of Religion 39th Conference – Worlds at the brink: Religion, Performativity and Future‑making
Start: 2027-02-15T00:00:00Z
End: 2027-02-20T00:00:00Z
Location: Buenos Aires

Feb 15–20, 2027Buenos Aires, ArgentinaIn-person

Registration open

The International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR) will host its 39th conference, themed "Worlds at the brink: Religion, Performativity and Future-making," in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This event brings together scholars to explore the multifaceted roles of religion in shaping contemporary societies, particularly in moments of perceived crisis or significant transformation. The conference aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on how religious practices and beliefs influence social action, identity formation, and the construction of future narratives.

Committees & topics

Topics
Religion, Populism, and Authoritarianism · Religious Education, Politics, and Society · The Making of Gods: Worldbuilding, Narrative, and Religious Performativity in Speculative Fiction · Contemporary Christianity, Organized Anti-Feminism, and Masculinity Politics · Cultural Creations and Mediations: Fiction and Religion in the Construction of Right-Wing Political Imaginaries · Religions, Spiritualities, and the Radical Right in the 21st Century · Revealing the Invisible: Visual and Audiovisual Forms in the World-Building of Religion

Why it matters

In an era characterized by rapid global changes and increasing uncertainties, understanding the dynamics of religion becomes crucial for effective international diplomacy and policy-making. This conference provides a platform to analyze how religious actors and institutions contribute to, or challenge, existing social orders and future projections. The focus on "performativity" highlights the active role of religion not just as a belief system, but as a force that shapes reality through rituals, narratives, and community actions. This perspective is vital for diplomats seeking to engage with diverse populations and navigate complex cultural landscapes.

The discussions at this conference are particularly relevant for understanding societal resilience and adaptation. As societies grapple with various "brinks" – be they environmental, political, or social – religious frameworks often offer both coping mechanisms and calls for transformative change. By examining these processes, policymakers can gain deeper insights into the motivations and worldviews of different communities, which is essential for fostering stability and cooperation. The location in Buenos Aires, ARG, further emphasizes the importance of understanding religious dynamics within diverse regional contexts, offering unique perspectives from South America.

How to prepare

For those preparing for diplomatic roles or engaging in international relations, understanding the sociological dimensions of religion is paramount. This conference offers an opportunity to deepen one's knowledge of how religious beliefs and practices influence political landscapes, social movements, and international relations. Participants should focus on papers and discussions that illuminate the intersection of religion with global challenges such as conflict resolution, human rights, and sustainable development. Paying close attention to case studies from various regions, including those outside of traditional Western contexts, will be particularly beneficial.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Argentina

Host country and a significant site for exploring the interplay of religion, culture, and social change in Latin America.

Role in topic

As the host nation, ARG provides a rich context for discussions on religion's role in society, particularly given its diverse religious landscape and history of social and political transformations. The conference in Buenos Aires offers a unique opportunity to examine how local religious expressions interact with global trends in performativity and future-making.

United States

A key player in global religious trends, with significant influence on academic discourse and diverse religious expressions.

Role in topic

The USA, with its robust academic tradition in the sociology of religion and its diverse religious demographics, often contributes significantly to global discussions on religious trends, secularization, and the role of faith in public life. Scholars from the USA are likely to present research on how religious groups engage in future-making within a pluralistic society.

India

A vibrant example of religious diversity and its complex relationship with national identity and political processes.

Role in topic

IND represents a crucial case study for understanding the performativity of religion in a multi-religious, democratic context. Discussions may explore how religious identities are constructed and performed in public spaces, influencing political discourse and societal futures in a nation with a vast array of spiritual traditions.

Türkiye

A bridge between East and West, where religion plays a significant role in national identity and geopolitical positioning.

Role in topic

TUR offers a compelling perspective on the interplay between religion, state, and identity. Research from TUR could explore how religious performativity shapes national narratives and influences foreign policy, particularly in a region marked by significant geopolitical shifts.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Religion, Populism, and Authoritarianism

The entanglement of religion with populist and authoritarian politics has intensified since the 2010s, as movements across continents have mobilized confessional identity to define 'the people' against pluralist elites and minorities. In the United States, white evangelical support became a structural pillar of Trumpism; in India, the BJP's Hindutva project has reframed citizenship around Hindu majoritarianism, culminating in legislation such as the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act. In Turkey, the AKP under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has steadily dismantled the Kemalist secular settlement, while in Hungary, Viktor Orbán has articulated an explicitly 'Christian democratic' illiberalism. Russia under Vladimir Putin has fused state power with the Moscow Patriarchate to legitimize both domestic conservatism and the invasion of Ukraine. The core analytical dispute concerns whether religion is instrumentalized by populist leaders as a thin civilizational marker, or whether confessional actors and theologies are themselves co-producers of authoritarian politics. Scholars such as Rogers Brubaker have described a 'civilizationism' in which Christianity functions as identity rather than faith, while others emphasize the agency of clerical networks, megachurches, and lay movements in shaping illiberal agendas around gender, migration, and education. Today the issue stands at a pivotal moment: democratic backsliding indices continue to record decline, while transnational alliances link the U.S. Christian right, European national-conservatives, Russian Orthodox traditionalists, and Latin American neo-Pentecostals around shared opposition to 'gender ideology,' LGBTQ rights, and liberal multilateralism.

Key players

Religious Education, Politics, and Society

Religious education sits at the intersection of state-building, identity formation, and contested visions of citizenship. Modern European states largely inherited confessional schooling systems that were partially secularized in the 19th and 20th centuries, producing a wide spectrum of arrangements: French laïcité strictly excludes confessional instruction from public schools (reinforced by the 2004 headscarf ban and the 2021 'separatism' law), Germany guarantees denominational religious instruction under the Basic Law, and the United Kingdom maintains state-funded faith schools alongside non-denominational RE. Beyond Europe, Turkey expanded mandatory Sunni religious instruction and imam-hatip schools under the AKP, while Indonesia balances Pancasila with a robust madrasah sector, and U.S. debates have shifted toward public funding of religious charter schools after Supreme Court rulings such as Carson v. Makin (2022). The core dispute concerns what religious education should do: transmit a tradition, foster civic pluralism, protect minority rights, or shield children from indoctrination. Controversies cluster around the place of Islam in European curricula, the teaching of evolution and gender, the autonomy of faith schools, and the rights of non-religious or minority-religion families. Critical scholarship also examines how 'world religions' frameworks themselves carry Protestant and Orientalist assumptions. The topic remains highly active: rising religious diversity, secularization in some societies and re-confessionalization in others, and culture-war politics around 'parental rights' and curriculum content have made schools a primary battleground over the religious shape of future citizens.

Key players

The Making of Gods: Worldbuilding, Narrative, and Religious Performativity in Speculative Fiction

Speculative fiction has long functioned as a laboratory for religion-making, from Tolkien's Catholic-inflected Middle-earth and Le Guin's Taoist Earthsea to Frank Herbert's Dune, where the Bene Gesserit deliberately seed messianic myths. In the late 20th and 21st centuries, invented religions and cosmologies in works such as Battlestar Galactica, The Handmaid's Tale, His Dark Materials, American Gods, and the expanding Marvel and Star Wars universes have become central vehicles through which mass audiences encounter theological questions about prophecy, sacrifice, evil, and transcendence. Some traditions, such as Jediism, have moved from screen to census category, while tabletop and online role-playing communities routinely co-create functioning ritual grammars. The analytical dispute concerns the ontological and sociological status of these creations. Scholars in the sociology of religion ask whether 'fiction-based religions' (Markus Davidsson), 'hyper-real religions' (Adam Possamai), and fandom spiritualities constitute genuine religious phenomena, parasitic playforms, or symptoms of a post-secular condition in which authority migrates from institutions to narrative worlds. Performativity theory, drawing on Austin and Butler, highlights how repeated narrative and ritual citation can call religious realities into being, blurring the line between depiction and instantiation. The issue is increasingly salient as streaming platforms globalize speculative imaginaries, generative AI accelerates worldbuilding, and political movements draw mythic vocabularies (Q's prophetic structure, ecological neo-paganisms, techno-millennialism) from popular culture itself.

Key players

Contemporary Christianity, Organized Anti-Feminism, and Masculinity Politics

Since the 1970s, Christian conservative movements have organized around opposition to feminism and LGBTQ rights, beginning with Phyllis Schlafly's defeat of the U.S. Equal Rights Amendment and the rise of Moral Majority politics. Catholic mobilization against abortion and 'gender ideology'—a term consolidated in Vatican documents in the 1990s and 2000s—has since fused with evangelical and Orthodox energies into a transnational network spanning the U.S. Christian right, CitizenGO, Tradition Family Property affiliates, Russia's World Congress of Families partnerships, Polish Ordo Iuris, and Latin American neo-Pentecostal coalitions. The 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade marked the most consequential recent victory of this alignment. In parallel, a distinct but overlapping 'masculinity politics' has emerged, in which Christian voices intersect with the secular manosphere, figures such as Jordan Peterson, and online influencers promoting 'biblical patriarchy,' Orthodox conversion narratives, and warrior-Christ imagery. Movements like Promise Keepers in the 1990s have been succeeded by online formations valorizing male authority, natalism, and the rejection of 'soft' or 'feminized' churches. Scholars such as Kristin Kobes Du Mez have documented how militant masculinity became central to American evangelical identity. The contemporary dispute concerns how religiously framed anti-feminism reshapes law, family policy, and democratic culture: from abortion bans and anti-trans legislation to opposition to the Istanbul Convention (rejected or withdrawn from by Turkey, with similar contestation in Poland and Hungary). The phenomenon stands at the intersection of theology, gender backlash, and right-wing political coalition-building.

Key players

Cultural Creations and Mediations: Fiction and Religion in the Construction of Right-Wing Political Imaginaries

Contemporary right-wing movements increasingly articulate themselves through cultural and fictional materials rather than formal theology. The Italian post-fascist tradition drew on Julius Evola's esotericism; the French Nouvelle Droite of Alain de Benoist mobilized pagan and Indo-European mythologies; American alt-right and 'Trad' subcultures circulate Tolkienian, Arthurian, and Orthodox iconography alongside meme-driven eschatologies. Russian state intellectuals such as Aleksandr Dugin weave Eurasianism with Orthodox apocalypticism, while Bolsonaro-era Brazil saw a fusion of neo-Pentecostal narrative tropes with nationalist storytelling. The QAnon phenomenon illustrates how a fictionally structured prophetic narrative can scale into mass political mobilization. The core analytical question concerns mediation: how novels, films, games, podcasts, memes, and reenactments operate as devices that fuse religious affect with political imagination, producing what scholars term 'political theologies from below.' Sociologists examine how aesthetic categories—heroic masculinity, civilizational decline, sacred homeland, demonic enemy—travel from fiction into platforms, party programs, and street politics, and how algorithmic media accelerate this circulation. The topic stands at the heart of current debates over disinformation, radicalization, and the cultural infrastructure of democratic erosion, raising questions about regulation, media literacy, and the responsibility of cultural producers whose works are appropriated by reactionary movements.

Key players

Religions, Spiritualities, and the Radical Right in the 21st Century

The 21st-century radical right is religiously eclectic. Alongside familiar Christian-nationalist forms—Hungarian and Polish national Catholicism, U.S. Christian nationalism, Russian political Orthodoxy—analysts have documented growing entanglements with neo-pagan, esoteric, and 'spiritual but not religious' currents. Identitarian movements in France and Germany draw on Nordic and Indo-European mythologies; sectors of the Brazilian and U.S. far right blend evangelical and New Age conspiracism (the 'conspirituality' described by Charlotte Ward and David Voas); Hindutva, Buddhist nationalisms in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, and Jewish ultranationalist currents in Israel each show distinctive fusions of devotion and ethno-political mobilization. The dispute among scholars concerns whether 'religion' best describes these phenomena at all, or whether categories such as civilizationism, sacralized politics, and post-secular spirituality more accurately capture them. Particular attention has focused on wellness-to-far-right pipelines exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, on Traditionalist (Guénon-Evola) currents influencing figures from Steve Bannon to Aleksandr Dugin, and on the role of online platforms in syncretizing previously distinct religious vocabularies into a shared radical-right idiom. The issue stands at a moment of rapid mutation, with electoral gains for radical-right parties across Europe, ongoing democratic stress in major states, and increasing concern from security agencies about religiously inflected extremist violence ranging from Christchurch (2019) to attacks framed by accelerationist and apocalyptic worldviews.

Key players

Revealing the Invisible: Visual and Audiovisual Forms in the World-Building of Religion

Religion has always relied on images, sound, and built space to render the invisible perceptible—from Byzantine icons and Gregorian chant to Hindu darshan and Sufi sama. Modern media revolutions have repeatedly reshaped this work: print engravings, photographic devotional cards, gospel radio, televangelism (Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, TV Globo's Universal Church programming), and more recently livestreamed worship, megachurch LED production, religious podcasts, TikTok preaching, and AI-generated devotional imagery. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this audiovisual turn, normalizing digital ritual participation across traditions. The scholarly debate, anchored in the 'material' and 'media' turns in religious studies (Birgit Meyer, David Morgan, Jeremy Stolow), concerns how sensory forms do not merely represent the sacred but actively produce it. Cameras, microphones, screens, and algorithms are now part of the infrastructure through which presence, charisma, and authority are constructed and contested. Questions arise about authenticity, the commodification of devotion, copyright and image rights, and the geopolitical asymmetries of who gets to picture whose gods. The topic stands at a critical juncture as generative AI enables the mass production of synthetic religious imagery (deepfaked clerics, AI 'visions,' chatbot spiritual directors), while platform governance, state regulation of religious broadcasting, and contestation over sacred images (from Charlie Hebdo to ongoing iconoclasm debates) underscore the political stakes of religious visibility.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for International Society for the Sociology of Religion 39th Conference – Worlds at the brink: Religion, Performativity and Future‑making.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis 2026

Rahul Gandhi Defends Tamil Nadu's Autonomy

India's 131st Amendment Bill

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Gender Dynamics Across Cultures

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Cross-Cultural Communication

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Argentina February 2027

By committee

Frequently asked questions

International Society for the Sociology of Religion 39th Conference – Worlds at the brink: Religion, Performativity and Future‑making

Feb 15–20, 2027Buenos Aires, ArgentinaIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Religion, Populism, and Authoritarianism · Religious Education, Politics, and Society · The Making of Gods: Worldbuilding, Narrative, and Religious Performativity in Speculative Fiction · Contemporary Christianity, Organized Anti-Feminism, and Masculinity Politics · Cultural Creations and Mediations: Fiction and Religion in the Construction of Right-Wing Political Imaginaries · Religions, Spiritualities, and the Radical Right in the 21st Century · Revealing the Invisible: Visual and Audiovisual Forms in the World-Building of Religion

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Argentina

Host country and a significant site for exploring the interplay of religion, culture, and social change in Latin America.

Role in topic

United States

A key player in global religious trends, with significant influence on academic discourse and diverse religious expressions.

Role in topic

India

A vibrant example of religious diversity and its complex relationship with national identity and political processes.

Role in topic

Türkiye

A bridge between East and West, where religion plays a significant role in national identity and geopolitical positioning.

Role in topic

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Religion, Populism, and Authoritarianism

Key players

Religious Education, Politics, and Society

Key players

The Making of Gods: Worldbuilding, Narrative, and Religious Performativity in Speculative Fiction

Key players

Contemporary Christianity, Organized Anti-Feminism, and Masculinity Politics

Key players

Cultural Creations and Mediations: Fiction and Religion in the Construction of Right-Wing Political Imaginaries

Key players

Religions, Spiritualities, and the Radical Right in the 21st Century

Key players

Revealing the Invisible: Visual and Audiovisual Forms in the World-Building of Religion

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for International Society for the Sociology of Religion 39th Conference – Worlds at the brink: Religion, Performativity and Future‑making.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis 2026

Rahul Gandhi Defends Tamil Nadu's Autonomy

India's 131st Amendment Bill

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Gender Dynamics Across Cultures

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Cross-Cultural Communication

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Argentina February 2027

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

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I Congreso de Relaciones Internacionales del Litoral

UPORFA XXVI International Congress 2026

XXXVII Congreso Argentino de Derecho Internacional

V Conference “Democracy and Inequalities”

XXVIII Congreso REDCOM 2026

Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

Seguridad y defensa en la era de la virtualidad

I Congreso de Relaciones Internacionales del Litoral

UPORFA XXVI International Congress 2026

XXXVII Congreso Argentino de Derecho Internacional

V Conference “Democracy and Inequalities”

XXVIII Congreso REDCOM 2026

Frequently asked questions