March 3–4, 2023

This conference is closed to the public. See agenda online. 

This conference will explore the multiple public contexts that continue to shape the perceptions of the meanings, power, and effects of religion among people of African descent. In particular, we will organize this year’s conversation around three dynamically related and interactive publics: the public sphere, religious communities, and the academic disciplines. Unlike in the West where the debate about religion and public life is often framed in terms of the relationship and conflict between presumably private values/institutions and the public sphere, in Africa and the African diaspora religion has always been lived and experienced as a public phenomenon, engaging other constituents of the public—the arts, music, politics, economy, law, and the broad character of the res publica. Thus, for this conversation we will focus on the public as a very dynamic concept and an entity that is always being formed, and perhaps taking different forms simultaneously, and struggling for influence through representation and by means of agencies.