Please send your abstract to Tatiana Rabinovich (trabino@ncsu.edu) by March 15

American Anthropological Association Meeting panel organized by Dr. Tatiana Rabinovich (North Carolina State University) & Dr. Alisa Perkins (Western Michigan University)

Please consider submitting an abstract for the proposed panel “Laboring Hearts: Gender, Religion, and Volunteerism in Uncertain Times” at the AAA Meetings in St. Louis, MO, Nov 18-22, 2020. This panel is organized by Dr. Tatiana Rabinovich (North Carolina State University) and Dr. Alisa Perkins (Western Michigan University). Abstracts should be no longer than 250 words.  Please send your abstract to Tatiana Rabinovich by March 15.  We will let you know if your paper has been selected for inclusion in the panel within one week after our deadline. Please see description below. We would be happy to answer any questions about the panel as it develops.

In times when many states are redefining their social responsibilities and embracing austerity, individuals are often called upon to help vulnerable populations by volunteering their time, money, and labor. Some who respond to these calls are driven by faith. This proposed panel studies intersections between religion, volunteerism, and power to understand the kinds of ethical subjectivities that are constituted through faith-driven volunteerism. The goal is to theorize how faith-inspired and gendered volunteer work illuminate the exigencies of late capitalism, as it pertains to citizenship, belonging, justice, and collective life. We will examine how political mobilizations, moral economies, and social imaginaries emerge from hands-on, faith-based giving. We will analyze how volunteers carve out spaces and resources for themselves and precarious others in ways that forge connections between the material and affective; the personal and political; and the intimate and global. We are interested in faith-driven giving practices that are structured by religious institutions or faith traditions, as well as those shaped within secular contexts and agencies. We welcome papers from scholars working across the globe, and particularly those focusing on contexts in which volunteers engage in activities that bring them in direct contact with members of the populations that they wish to serve.