[Commlist] CFP — "Why We Come Together": Media, Religion, and Community

CFP: "Why We Come Together" — Media, Religion, and Community (CU 
Boulder, October 2026)

Call for Papers
"Why We Come Together": Media, Religion, and Community The 12th 
International Conference of the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture 
Williams Village, University of Colorado Boulder 21–23 October 2026

Abstract deadline: 30 May 2026 Submissions and inquiries: 
_cmrc@colorado.edu_ <mailto:(cmrc /at/ colorado.edu)>
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Communication and media studies scholars are warmly invited to submit. 
No payment from authors is required.

In a sermon delivered at Trinity Church in New York City, Fred Moten 
(2020) reminded congregants of the meaning of fellowship and "why we 
come together." Recounting a community in his native Arkansas that 
gathered to complete the work in his deceased grandfather's garden, 
Moten emphasized the value of responding to the call — not only to 
overturn the soil and help a family cope with grief, but to overturn the 
order of a turbulent world. His sermon, "This Is How We Fellowship," 
extends a provocation about what it means to "be in community" in our 
fractured world today.

Taking up bell hooks's concept of "homeplace," this conference asks 
where community can be found amid social fragmentation, genocide, and 
networked substitutes for belonging. At a time when communities continue 
to assemble along hardened lines of ethnicity, racial supremacy, 
religious nationalism, and bordered belonging, have we betrayed the 
meaning of community? At a time when our media ecosystems heighten both 
connectivity and isolation, is there hope in shared community?

In The Earthly Community (2023), Achille Mbembe argues that the world 
faces a crisis of breathability — ecological, political, and spiritual. 
He warns against enclosure, separation, and extraction, and calls for 
the cultivation of "an assembly of the living" grounded in 
interdependence, repair, and mutual care through difference. The call to 
community is a refusal of enclosure — an insistence on fellowship as a 
collective, life-affirming response to planetary exhaustion.
We invite scholars, artists, activists, and media practitioners to 
reflect on the intersections of media, religion, and community — not as 
fixed categories, but as active and unstable formations through which 
people come together to struggle and imagine otherwise. We are 
especially interested in work that explores how communities are 
mediated, fragmented, or newly constituted in our hypermediated moment.

Featured speakers:

  * Fred Moten (New York University)
  * Stefano Harney
  * Nichole M. Flores (University of Virginia)
  * Jen Deerinwater (Crushing Colonialism)

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

  * Digital infrastructures and formations of religious publics and
    communities
  * Community formation and the discourse of spirituality
  * Religion, community formation, and fragmentation
  * Alternative forms of community outside of organized religion
  * Community organizing, activism, media, and religion
  * Secularism, religion, and the negotiation of community spaces
  * Media, algorithms, and rituals of community
  * Feminist and LGBTQIA+ configurations of religious community
  * Race, technology, spirituality, and experiments of liberation
  * Decolonial epistemologies and spiritual imaginaries of relation
  * Archives and mediated practices of historical repair
  * Mediated ecologies of community and care in the context of planetary
    crisis
  * Speculative media and pluriversal visions of community

Submission formats:

  * Individual papers: 300-word abstract plus 100-word bio
  * Panel proposals (3–4 presenters): 250-word overview plus individual
    abstracts for each paper
  * Roundtables and non-traditional sessions (workshops, performances,
    screenings): 300–500-word proposal outlining aims, format, and
    participants

Deadline: 22 May 2026 Submit to: _cmrc@colorado.edu_ 
<mailto:(cmrc /at/ colorado.edu)> No payment from authors is required.

This will be the twelfth in a series of international conferences hosted 
by the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture at the University of 
Colorado Boulder. Previous meetings have shaped theory and method in 
media, religion, and cultural studies and led to important publications 
and collaborations.

For inquiries, contact: Center for Media, Religion, and Culture, 
University of Colorado Boulder _cmrc@colorado.edu_ 
<mailto:(cmrc /at/ colorado.edu)>
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Conference convener: Nabil Echchaibi, Professor of Media Studies and 
Director, Center for Media, Religion and Culture College of Media, 
Communication, Design and Information, University of Colorado Boulder 
_nabil.echchaibi@colorado.edu_ <mailto:(nabil.echchaibi /at/ colorado.edu)>




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