CfP Workshop: Identifying as Woman in Transnational Religious Spaces: Contemporary Dynamics of Lived Religion, Femininity, and Womanhood, 18-20 November 2026

28 Mai 2026

In 2026, most people move in and therefore practice their religion in transnational spaces, be it due to voluntary migration or forced displacement or simply due to the global entanglements of contemporary religions that manifest in global movements of ideas and practices. Thus, transnationality functions as a central and possibly defining characteristic of lived religious practice—also of those identifying and being identified as women in a diverse and heterogenous way.

In the context of this workshop, we want to draw attention to the interrelation between women’s everyday religious practices and transnational dynamics that come with performative discourses of femineity and womanhood. The questions we hope to address: 

• How are femininity and womanhood negotiated, lived, and embodied in transnational religious spaces—and whose femininity and womanhood is made visible or rendered invisible in these processes?
• What does this tell us about current discourses on femininity and womanhood and their intertwining with other global, including colonial and postcolonial, political and social discourses?
• What is the lived reality of women in these transnational spaces, and how does it relate to their practice of religions?
• How does being in transnational spaces affect women’s lived religion, or conversely, how does lived religion shape women’s existence within these very spaces?
• Who or what holds the social and cultural agency in the context of discourses and practices, specifically materialities and aesthetics, in transnational spaces of women’s lived religion?
• And not least: How does women’s lived religion become a political issue in transnational spaces?

In the context of this workshop, we understand transnational spaces as dynamic, open yet performative and highly formative cultural and social configurations whose boundaries are constantly being renegotiated; they expand as practices as well as actual physical and imagined places across national borders. We understand lived religion as produced through everyday embodied enactment. Lived religion draws attention to meaning-making through practice and experience, and through the interplay of individual agency and collective frameworks. We speak of femininity and womanhood as social and cultural discourses of material, aesthetic, and performative social and cultural impact and frameworks that may shape both the spaces we study and our own analytical gaze.

For our workshop, we invite contributions that address above questions in their own empiric research contexts.

The workshop will take place from 18 to 20 November 2026 at the Institute for Cultural Studies, Department of the Study of Religion with a focus on Islam, at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich.

To participate, please submit a brief abstract of 250 words to the co-organizers, Lina Aschenbrenner (lina.aschenbrenner@unibw.de) and Sophie Moser (sophie.moser@unibw.de). Deadline for submission: June 30, 2026.