FBK ISR at the 9th EuARe Conference in Rome

Researchers from the FBK Center for Religious Studies are participating in several open panels at the 9th Conference of European Academy of Religion (EuARe), “Religion and (In)equalities”, held at the University of Rome LUISS Guido Carli,  30 June – 3 July 2026.

We invite you to read the descriptions of the FBK-ISR open panels and submit a paper proposal by 13 March 2026.

OPEN PANEL – The (Im)Materiality of Religious Inequalities in Urban Spaces:  Past and Present

The session aims to explore how inequalities are inscribed in European urban spaces through architectural forms and religious practices. On the one hand, architectures dedicated to worship can make established hierarchies visible or, conversely, become instruments of inclusion and of redistributing access to urban space. On the other hand, inequalities themselves produce specific material configurations: monumental and officially recognized buildings stand alongside adaptive, temporary, or marginal spaces, revealing different levels of legitimation and possibilities of settlement for religious groups. From this perspective, the processes of defining and safeguarding religious heritage also contribute to structuring inequalities: while some buildings are enhanced as cultural assets and benefit from public resources, many minority places of worship struggle to obtain recognition and visibility, remaining excluded from conservation circuits and facing forms of material and symbolic marginalization. Alongside these material dynamics, new digital spatialities are emerging. Three-dimensional virtual environments – from replicas of iconic places to immersive platforms used for ritual practices – potentially expand religious participation, but they can also reproduce barriers to access and asymmetries from the offline world. Hybrid practices that combine physical and virtual presence open up further perspectives, showing how communities creatively negotiate the limits imposed by infrastructures, urban regulations, and available resources. The session invites contributions that critically analyze these intersections between the material and the immaterial, highlighting how inequalities take shape, are reproduced, or are transformed through contemporary religious architectures, spaces, and practices

Chair: Maria Chiara Giorda, Silvia Omenetto

Contact:  Valeria Fabretti ([email protected])

OPEN PANEL – Entangled Encounters: Material and Social Transformations of Religious Communities in Europe

Since the turn of the millennium, migration to Europe has significantly increased. Individuals have come to this continent often fleeing conflict and political instability as well as seeking improved social and economic wellbeing. For migrants, engagement in religious practice is a key resource in the post-migration period. Religious activities and infrastructure offer practical and spiritual support, as well as being a source of social belonging for newly arriving migrants. These factors often help individuals navigate structural inequalities, for example, facilitating access to social services. Yet, they may also reproduce inequality, for example when religious authority is used to regulate behaviour within these groups and/or to foster prejudice and discrimination against other groups. At the same time, these dynamics unfold within European contexts shaped by varied secularisation trajectories, which influence how religious practices are perceived and negotiated in everyday life. This panel examines encounters between migrant religious communities and other religious and secular groups within these shifting contexts. Such encounters often involve material transformations: repurposed religious buildings, adapted ritual forms and new uses of public space, which might extend to the digital realm. They also generate embodied and sensorial experiences and modes of expression that engage sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. Analysing these encounters from perspectives that are intersectional/multidimensional can help gain significant insights into how changes in gender-, age-, and social-status-related dynamics happen in religious communities who experience migration processes. We invite papers exploring how, through these entanglements, religious traditions are reinterpreted and transformed and, in turn, contribute to shaping contemporary and future European societies

Chair: Valeria Fabretti, Susanna Trotta, Farah Hasan

Contact: Susanna Trotta ([email protected])

OPEN PANEL – Religion and Spirituality on the Frontier of Emerging Technologies

The panel engages reasonings on religion and spirituality on the frontier of emerging technologies investigating how religious and spiritual practices are evolving alongside the emergence of digital technologies. This panel asks: What values, biases, and social norms do these technologies encode? Are they used to promote equality, or to accentuate differences and deepen social, political and cultural differences? In what ways are emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence used to contribute to or challenge existing empirical and theoretical debates? Through concrete and diverse case studies, this panel examines how forms of spiritual life and expression are evolving across multiple cultural and religious contexts through their encounter with emerging technologies. From the integration of artificial intelligence tools by professional spiritual care providers in healthcare settings to the emergence of new, AI-related eschatological imaginaries, and the global rise of digital platforms within new religious movements, this panel explores the ways in which technology is simultaneously used to enable new forms of connection, ritual, tradition, and meaning-making, while also raising profound ethical questions. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship in the field of digital religion(s), the panellists will engage with theoretical and empirical debates from theology, religious studies, and anthropology. In exploring their research questions, the panellists foster constructive and critical dialogue with religious and spiritual communities, and deepen our understanding of how faith, spirituality, and technology co-evolve in a rapidly changing world. Ultimately, this panel invites participants to reflect on the potential role and responsibility of religion and spirituality in (re)shaping responsible and compassionate technological futures—futures that acknowledge both the possibilities and dangers of innovation in an increasingly connected yet divided world.

Chair: Beth Singler, Fabian Winiger, Kristina Eiviler, Katharina Yadav, Accursio Graffeo

Contact: Accursio Graffeo ([email protected])

OPEN PANEL – Whose Bioethics? Religious Traditions and the Non-Religious Translations in a Plural World

Addressing bioethical questions through the lens of religious traditions is both demanding and necessary. Even in contemporary secularised societies, religious imaginaries continue to shape how we understand life and death, illness and healing, vulnerability and care. Yet when we speak of bioethical standards, whose standards are we invoking? The language of dignity, autonomy, or vulnerability embedded in the debate and reported in protocols and policies often presents itself as universal while reflecting particular Western and secular genealogies. This framing can obscure a more complex reality: bioethics as a field shaped by plural grammars of value, lived identities, and overlapping worlds of meaning. Rather than presupposing a fixed opposition between religious and secular ethics, the panel invites reflection on how diverse moral worlds intersect, challenge, and translate one another. We aim to move beyond narratives of conflict or incompatibility by exploring how religious and faith traditions may function as substantive interlocutors in contemporary bioethical discourse. We welcome contributions that examine how religious and faith values and imaginaries are reconfigured within secular frameworks, how they inform practices of care, clinical decision-making, and policy debates, and how they might help articulate more equitable and imaginative bioethical futures. Possible Topics and Approaches – Comparative analyses of religious and non-religious approaches to autonomy, dignity, or vulnerability – The translations and adaptations of religious values within non-religious bioethical or legal frameworks – The role of ritual, embodiment, and suffering in shaping moral reasoning in healthcare – Public theology and bioethics in democratic deliberation and policy design – Empirical or ethnographic studies of how religious and moral imaginaries inform care practices

Chair: Tommaso Ropelato, Georgiana Diana Apostica, Lucia Galvagni

Contact: Tommaso Ropelato

View all the Conference panels here

Please submit your abstract for one or more of the open panels by 13 March 2026 via this link