Sessions — NCSR 2026
The following sessions have been accepted for the NCSR 2026 conference.
If you want to present a paper during one of the sessions, please send your abstract (300 words max.) as a Microsoft Word document or PDF by email to the session chairs by February 1, 2026.
Open Sessions
If you have any questions about a session, please email the chairperson for that session.
The number of people who identify as having no religious affiliation is increasing across the Nordic Countries. Although the sociological study of nonreligion is growing, we need to know more about the “nones.” Some identity as atheist, while others see themselves as agnostic, indifferent, spiritual but not religious or something in between. While the trend is that the nones are growing in the Nordic countries, they still constitute a minority in most of these countries. How does this heterogeneous group affect society and how do the different societies accommodate them? Which implications does the growth of the “nones” have for law, health, education, migration, nature, and other aspects of society? These questions are relevant for most countries, but this session focuses, in particular, on how nonreligion affects and is affected by the Nordic context. We welcome papers that discuss a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as research designs, and papers based on empirical research. The aim is to contribute to new research on this growing phenomenon.
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairperson:
Inger Furseth
inger.furseth@sosgeo.uio.no
University of Oslo
Research on contemporary religious landscapes seeks to understand religious diversity not only as the presence of multiple traditions but also through the positionalities produced by intersecting mechanisms of identification, inclusion and exclusion. This implies a particular interest in the experiences of invisible and socially or discursively marginalised or stigmatised groups, like migrant communities or new religious movements. At the same time it is often these kinds of groups that become the object of politicised calls for knowledge production and demands for actionable knowledge from state institutions, media, and civil society. This can produce a tension within academic work: the very act of studying marginalised communities may inadvertently feed into governmental or policy-oriented frameworks that rely on simplified or securitised understandings of religion.
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s distinction between “lived religion,” “governed religion,” and “expert religion” offers a productive framework for analysing this dynamic. Expert religion refers to the forms of religion constructed by those who generate policy-relevant knowledge—scholars, consultants, state agencies, or bureaucratic bodies. In contrast, we suggest adding a fourth category to this framework: “expertise on religion” denoting a scholarly mode of inquiry guided not by policy imperatives but by scholarly questions and disciplinary principles like methodological rigor, theoretical openness, and a commitment to understanding religious life on its own terms.
For scholars of religion, navigating between these frameworks can be challenging. Research that seeks to increase visibility for underrepresented groups can be double-edged, simultaneously enabling recognition and risking exposure, misinterpretation, or political instrumentalisation. Contemporary methodological tools like mapping of institutions, cities, or countries can intensify these dynamics by transforming complex lived realities into governable categories. Yet failure to engage with policy requests for knowledge may undermine ambitions of contemporary academia of providing societal relevance.
This open paper session invites contributions that critically examine the study of contemporary religious diversity. We particularly welcome papers that address:
- methodological dilemmas in researching vulnerable or marginalised religious actors,
- challenges in the interface between expert religion and expertise on religion,
- reflexive strategies for mitigating the risks of contributing to external agendas,
- case studies highlighting how participation or research dissemination shapes public, political, or media perceptions,
- critical engagements with the epistemic and ethical consequences of producing “knowledge about religion” in contexts of surveillance, governance, or cultural anxiety,
By bringing these discussions together, the session aims to clarify how scholars can responsibly navigate competing demands while sustaining rigorous, context-sensitive expertise on religion.
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairperson:
Lene Kühle
LK@cas.au.dk
School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University
This session explores the increasingly complex entanglements between religion, cultural heritage, and national identity in the Nordic countries and across Europe. In many European contexts, the nexus between majority religion, national identity, and notions of cultural heritage has become a site of political contestation. Such linkages carry both mobilizing potential and a strong capacity for polarization. Political actors frequently seek to anchor national identity in particular religious and heritage narratives, while others challenge these constructions and highlight the exclusionary dynamics they may reinforce.
The session, therefore, invites papers that examine how relationships between religion and cultural heritage are constructed—or dismantled—within religious, political, academic, or popular cultural discourses. Key questions include: What functions do these nexuses serve? How are “religion” and “national identity” conceptualized in different contexts? Who is included or excluded through such narratives? How do marginalized groups experience, challenge, or resist dominant narratives? The session also welcomes analyses of how Nordic majority churches, minority religious communities, or life-stance organizations respond to or participate in shaping these debates. Papers that offer reflections on methodological and theoretical questions are likewise encouraged: What datasets, methodologies, and perspectives are best suited for analyzing politicized discourses on cultural heritage and religion?
By bringing together diverse empirical cases and analytical approaches, this session aims to advance more nuanced understandings of how religion, cultural heritage, and national identity are negotiated in contemporary Nordic and European contexts.
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairpersons:
|
Sven Thore Kloster |
Linnea Jensdotter |
Research – including the study of religion – can engage with art in various ways: not only as an object of study, but also as a methodological tool and a collaborative partner. Artistic practices, artworks, and audiences can shape research by serving as a subject of analysis, a medium for collecting and presenting data, a discursive field that intersects with religion (or secularity), or by fulfilling other roles. Artists themselves can also assume diverse roles within research projects, from co-creators to critical interlocutors. Such collaborations offer rich opportunities for innovation but also pose challenges, including negotiating disciplinary boundaries and balancing analytical rigor with creative expression.
This session invites scholars of religion to reflect on the possibilities and limits of integrating art-related methodologies into the sociology of religion. How can artistic forms, such as visual arts, music, literature, theatre, dance, or performance, inform the study of religion? What benefits and tensions arise when research incorporates activist art, outsider art, public installations, or private aesthetic practices, particularly in highlighting religion as a social issue or engaging with societal inequalities and power dynamics? How do these collaborations reshape our analytical frameworks and ethical considerations? We welcome papers that address the diverse ways of engaging with art from different perspectives, including case studies, innovative or experimental research designs, as well as more theoretical contributions.
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairperson:
Alexandra Bergholm
alexandra.bergholm@helsinki.fi
University of Helsinki
Authoritarian right-wing movements past and present are centrally concerned with establishing control and dominance over the higher education sector (Stanley 2025). We have over the past few years seen unprecedented attacks on academic freedom in Western liberal democracies which have ranked highly on global academic freedom indexes. “Combatting antisemitism” through applying contested definitions of antisemitism (Bangstad 2025) have featured centrally in these attacks, but there have also been attacks on the teaching of race and racism, gender studies, DEI programs, and trans rights (Engebretsen 2024). “One might begin by asking whether there are conditions under which academic freedom may be exercised”, argues Butler (2015), and proposes that “institutional conditions are part of its [academic freedoms] very definition.” They have also called for a “transnationalisation of academic freedom” (Butler, 2022, 2025) as a necessary way forward.
Given that authoritarian right-wing movements and actors that are now on the rise in Europe trade on social and political imaginaries anchored in white, heteronormative and masculinist ressentiments and affects, to the extent that we as researchers research, engage with, and sometimes also seek to represent underrepresented populations, the marginalized, the vulnerable and the socially excluded, we also incur the risks of becoming targets for these very movements and actors. On the other hand, these movements and actors also seek to represent people who often see themselves as marginalized socially and politically by middle class academic elites and secular feminists (Pasieka 2024).
In this open session, we invite papers that explore the concepts of academic freedom in specific nation-state contexts, but also in transnational contexts, and from theoretical and/or empirical perspectives. We solicit papers that engage with matters pertaining to academic freedom and how to defend it with particular reference to underrepresented populations. We ask if there is anything particular that sociologists of religion may contribute to this field.
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairperson:
Sindre Bangstad
sindre.bangstad@kifo.no
KIFO Institute For Church, Religion & Worldview Research
Gender differences in religious belief and practice have been a central focus in the sociology of religion for decades. Research has consistently shown that women, especially in Christian-majority contexts, are more religious than men and more active in congregational life. Yet leadership in most religious organizations continues to be dominated by men.
Recent evidence, however, suggests that this long-standing pattern is shifting. Religiosity among women has been declining rapidly in many countries, while young men are showing renewed interest in religion. In addition, the experiences of non-binary individuals and sexual minorities complicate traditional assumptions. These groups are often more likely to distance themselves from institutional religion, yet their relation to religion is understudied.
Despite evolving trends, research has rarely examined men’s everyday religious practices outside hierarchical roles, and non-binary individuals remain largely invisible in scholarship. Earlier focus on women was essential in counterbalancing male-centered studies, but it has also contributed to persistent gaps in our understanding of how religion is lived across diverse gender identities.
This session explores how religion is experienced, practiced, and negotiated by men, women, and non-binary individuals today. We approach gender as fluid and context-dependent, moving beyond binary frameworks and examining how gender and sexuality intersect with religious involvement, belief, and belonging. Our aim is to foster dialogue on the changing gender dynamics of religiosity and to highlight perspectives that challenge established narratives.
We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions addressing topics such as:
- The religiosity of men, women, and non-binary individuals in different cultural and religious contexts,
- Shifts in gendered patterns of religiosity, particularly among younger generations,
- Role of gender in religion at different life stages,
- The role of gender in religious disaffiliation and secularization,
- Everyday religious practices and experiences of men, especially outside of leadership and hierarchical contexts,
- Feminist, queer, and intersectional perspectives on religion and gender,
- How religion shapes, reinforces, or challenges gender norms in various societies.
We especially encourage research providing new empirical insights into underrepresented groups and everyday contexts of religious life.
By bringing together diverse perspectives, this session aims to deepen understanding of how gender shapes religious experience, and how contemporary transformations in religion and society are reshaping gender identities in turn.
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairperson:
Kati Tervo-Niemelä
kati.tervo-niemela@uef.fi
University of Eastern Finland
Recent years—marked by pandemic disruptions, geopolitical instability, ecological crisis, and rising secularization—have highlighted anew how religious leaders navigate questions of power, authority, and credibility. This session explores religious leadership in contexts where traditional authority is both contested and urgently needed.
The session invites research on religious leadership within Christianity and other religious traditions, addressing how leaders interpret and perform their roles in changing social environments. One of the studies included presents results from a Nordic survey among church leaders in Lutheran majority contexts. Against the background of growing religious and worldview diversity, secularization, and institutional decline, this 2024–2025 study explores how church leaders describe their everyday work and how they perceive their role in church and society.
We welcome paper proposals that examine how religious leadership is practiced, experienced, and interpreted in various contexts.
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairpersons:
|
Kati Tervo-Niemelä |
Cecilia Nahnfeldt |
Annette Leis-Peters |
Migration has long been a key factor in shaping the religious landscape of the Nordic countries, and it continues to transform religion at structural, organisational and individual levels of society. These shifts generate new forms of diversity and raise pressing questions of representation and marginalisation, within broader society as well as in scholarly research.
While Nordic scholarship has extensively examined the relationship between migration and religion, there is still a lack of research dealing with intersections of gender and religious minorities within these dynamics. Further research is needed on women, migration and religious minorities, but there is also a notable research gap on men, masculinities, and indigenous groups. In this open session we turn attention to these topics, with the aim of fostering dialogue on the complex interplay between migration, religious minorities, and gender.
We invite papers that explore how gender intersects with religious minorities and migration in Nordic contexts. The concept religious minorities is applied broadly and may include a wide range of minority communities within larger religious traditions such as Christianity, Buddhism and Islam. We also encourage research that address minorities within minorities, as well as marginalised groups such as sexual and gendered minorities. Papers that apply intersectional approaches to individual identities and structures of inequality are particularly welcome, including contributions that critically analyse the categories of gender, religion and migration in relation to one another, without reducing gender or religion to merely additive dimensions. We also welcome papers addressing methodological challenges in researching underrepresented and marginalised populations, with the aim of advancing more reflexive, inclusive and de-colonised approaches in the sociology of religion.
Possible research questions include, but are not limited to:
- How has migration shaped religious landscapes and everyday lives in Nordic contexts?
- In what ways do religion and gender intersect in religious minority communities in the Nordics?
- What religious practices and forms of gendered agency are emerging in Nordic migrant settings?
- What methodological challenges and issues of representation arise when researching the intersections of religious minorities and gender in this context?
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairpersons:
|
Marianne Hafnor Bøe |
Line Nyhagen |
This session discusses the relationship between religion and right-wing populism in Scandinavia and across Europe. Like in many Western countries, right-wing populist parties are on the rise in the Nordic countries, especially among young men. The turn towards authoritarian values has, in many cases, also led to a resurgence of traditional forms of religion. Reports from several countries indicate that young people are being radicalised and attracted to authoritarian values.
In this session, we welcome theoretical and empirical papers that examine how right-wing populism and religion interact. Papers can look at why young people, especially young men, are attracted to right-wing populism and, at the same time, traditional forms of religion. Articles may also examine how far-right parties or politicians use religion in their rhetoric, or how Christian leaders respond to populist politicians, including their policies on gender equality, environmental protection, and immigration.
Furthermore, we want to discuss recruitment into these movements: what factors at the individual and societal levels can explain why young people are attracted to them? Theories of radicalisation point to marginalisation as a crucial factor. At the societal level, increasing uncertainty related to rapid changes in material and cultural conditions may pave the way for radical groups.
Religion is an element in the turn towards authoritarian populism. In previous research, religion has been used to explain political preferences. Recently, theorists have turned this around and started to view religion as an effect variable influenced by political processes. Are people becoming more interested in religion as a side effect of becoming fascinated with populist ideas?
Right-wing populists often use religion to achieve political goals. This is done in different ways. In Western European countries, populists often use Christianity as an identity marker and counterweight to Islam, while in other cases, they are also concerned with religion as belief or practice. The authoritarian and populist wave brings religion back into politics, albeit often in a more indirect form than in the past.
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairperson:
Pål Ketil Botvar
pal.k.botvar@uia.no
University of Agder
In Nordic parliaments, as well as political culture generally, religion often becomes conspicuous in situations where conservative perspectives that advocate for public religion clash with liberal and secular views. However, the practice of legitimating politics with religion is embraced by only a few politicians. Islam is often the subject of distinct governance and portrayed as threat in far-right identity politics. Typically, political discussion on religion concerns freedom of religion and its balance with other rights and freedoms. Nonetheless, not all instances of the political presence of religion are conflictual, as national churches maintain an unquestioned position, and established parties continue to uphold the churches’ privileged status in various ways.
This panel invites papers that delve into the presence of religion in political culture, examining the ways in which religion is used to legitimate politics or how religion is legitimated or de-legitimated in politics within Nordic, European, and global contexts. We interpret our key concepts, politics, political culture, and legitimation, broadly. Example topics include, but are not limited to: religion and party politics, religion and political activism, national churches and political culture, political influence of religious actors, the political governance of religious diversity, and methodological considerations in the study of religion, politics and legitimation.
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairperson:
Titus Hjelm
titus.hjelm@helsinki.fi
University of Helsinki
Research on minoritized religious communities has often focused on the structural discrimination, exclusion and intersecting forms of oppression that shape their everyday lives. While this scholarship has generated valuable insights into how power operates within contemporary societies, it risks overshadowing the internal diversity and agential capacity that also characterize marginalized religious communities. Alongside experiences of exclusion, these communities cultivate practices and tactical responses of hope, creativity, and alternative imaginaries that sustain a sense of belonging and possibility.
This session proposes to shift the analytical perspective towards joy as a meaningful lens through which to understand the lived experiences of religious minorities. Approaching marginalized religious communities with an analytical perspective of joy can illuminate how these communities negotiate marginality, resist reduction to victimhood, and create spaces where alternative social, spiritual, and emotional realities are imagined and enacted. By foregrounding joy, the session will reconsider dominant framings within sociology of religion that render marginalized groups primarily through the prism of vulnerability. Whilst recognizing the structural conditions that shape the lived experiences of religious minorities, centering the research around dimensions of joy allows for a more nuanced and multilayered understanding of religious minority life.
This session invites contributions that examine how joy takes shape in practices, rituals, narratives, communal forms, or institutional engagements; how it intersects with resistance and belonging; and how it may advance theoretical and methodological debates within sociology of religion. In doing so, this session aims to broaden the analytical repertoire of the field and to contribute to ongoing conversations about religion, marginality, agency and everyday religious life.
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairperson:
Anna Holmqvist
anna.holmqvist@teol.uu.se
Uppsala University
Mystical experiences interpreted within institutional religions have historically been studied in the field of science of religion. However, varieties of mystical experience among the general public and among populations at the margins of society outside institutional religions remain understudied. By examining religion in its various forms – and in this case, mystical experiences interpreted both within and outside institutional religions – the Sociology of Religion offers an analytic lens partly distinct from other disciplines studying religion. This trajectory signals a promising expansion of the Sociology of Religion in a Nordic context, providing sociological and contextual insights into mystical experiences that enrich the global interdisciplinary field of research while contributing to discussions of secularisation.
This session invites paper proposals exploring mystical experiences among the general public as well as among the marginalised, vulnerable and socially excluded. Mystical experience is conceived broadly to encompass interpretations and phenomena that may, for instance, have been described as religious, spiritual, transformative, existential, paranormal, supernatural or inexplicable. Contributors are encouraged to reflect on methodological challenges in this line of research.
Possible questions papers may address include: How are spontaneous mystical experiences interpreted by individuals among the public or by marginalised, vulnerable and socially excluded individuals or groups? How meaningful are the experiences? Which cultural, social or local norms inform the attitudes toward, understanding of and narration of mystical experiences? Under what social and contextual conditions can mystical experiences function as a resource – supporting health, resilience and coherence – or as obstacles, contributing to unhealthiness, stigma and exclusion? How can mystical experiences relate to trauma and unhealth/health and coping strategies? How are mystical experiences integrated into everyday life, the life narrative, the identity and social roles? To what extent can varieties of mystical experience lead to the formation of new communities and social networks, online or offline? How can sociological research capture and analyze deeply subjective, often ineffable experiences, not least among marginalised or vulnerable populations? What methodological and ethical challenges arise in studying mystical experiences, and how can they be addressed? How can sociological theory and perspectives, for instance, secularisation, pluralisation and medialisation frameworks, illuminate the study of mystical experiences outside institutional religions?
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairperson:
Katarina Johansson
katarina.g.johansson@abo.fi, katarina@kenosis.se
Åbo Akademi University/ Uppsala University
The session will address how groups that are less visible within a religious majority can be studied with new methods or combinations of methods as well as how such studies can contribute to the development of both established and emerging theories.
The focus of this roundtable will be on innovation and validity in empirically testing new theories and concepts that have gain much attention in current sociology of religion, such as lived religion, post-secularity, culturalized religion and hybrid religion.
The session welcomes short papers (5-7 minutes) which present the complexity of the research case in focus and the used or proposed research design and will centre on a collective discussion of the issues raised. Examples of relevant contributions are questions such as how lived religion can be studied with a mixed-methods perspective, how culturalised religion can best be explored amongst groups with different social and cultural capital, or the significance of gender, age and ethnicity for more individualized forms of religiosity?
Session Format: Roundtable
Session Chairperson:
Martha Middlemiss Lé Mon
martha.middlemiss@crs.uu.se
CRS, Uppsala University
The late-modern era has witnessed a range of highly notable transformations in the Christian field on a worldwide scale. As the societal and cultural influence of traditional institutional Christianity continues to wane, independent non-denominational “seeker sensitive” churches continue to proliferate and thrive. In addition to these changes in bias, a wide range of alternative understandings that often significantly expand on the conventional boundaries of the “Christian” have also continued to form, proliferate, and mutate in the “margins” of contracting institutional Christian “mainstreams.” These margins consist of a multitude of often informally or weakly organized sites of eclectic religious or spiritual exploration that have largely remained unmarked by the presence of institutional and more firmly organized religious actors.
One of the most significant among these sites is the field of alternative spiritual healing and meditation practices. These practices have become increasingly established throughout the West following the wider proliferation of various types of holistic spiritualities since the mid-1960s, mainly sourced by ideas and practices derived from Asian religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, especially as mediated through Theosophy and the so-called New Age. Previous scholarship has also noted the presence and visibility of Christian ideas and notions in the field, and the creation of “Christianized” variants of e.g. mindfulness and yoga. These types of more direct Christian engagements with alternative spiritual healing and meditation practices have typically occurred on the margins of institutional Christianity and have involved the forming of particular strategies to reconcile core Christian beliefs with other notions prevalent in the broader field of holistic spiritualities, such as the channelling of energies, for example.
This panel explores the present-day relationship between Christianity and alternative healing and meditation practices in various geographical contexts. We invite paper proposals, which focus on the ways in which Christianity affects the alternative practices, or how these in turn transform Christianity. The geographical and cultural context, and the form of Christianity in question may vary. We also invite proposals on the various new and alternative meanings that people attach to the “Christian” both within and in relation to alternative healing and meditation practices, as well as the reasons for these practices forming important sites for religious and spiritual exploration.
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairperson:
Minna Opas
minna.opas@utu.fi
University of Turku
International migration has now for several decades been transformative force of religious change in societies around the world. Numerous new religious minorities have emerged as a result and some areas have become religiously highly diverse, so called super-diverse majority-minority cities. Academic research has followed this development and various perspectives have emerged to conceptualize the situation. Discourses have gradually shifted from multiculturalism/world religions to diaspora/pluralism/diversity to transnationalism/super-diversity. Much of the current discussion on ethno-religious diversity emphasizes critical, de-constructive perspectives, such as postcolonialism, but essentialist identities is still commonly prescribed to religious minorities. This session is open to all papers discussing some aspects of migration and religion, and also welcomes critical contributions.
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairperson:
Tuomas Martikainen
tuomas.martikainen@utu.fi
University of Turku
Necropolitics in the Nordic countries examine how death and dead bodies become governed in contemporary societies. We understand necropolitics as a vehicle for the expression of values and goals within society at large, communities, civil society, and individuals, as agents in their own right or by virtue of being actors in dealing with death, bereavement, and body disposal. This means that how society manages the dead bodies, establishes and maintains deathscapes, such as cemeteries, and how the living maintains relations with the deceased are significant factors in understanding necropolitics. This panel invites papers that address necropolitics in the Nordic context. It asks for in-depth empirical and contextual studies. By this, it allows tracing of factors that are similar as well as differ across the Nordic countries regarding necropolitics.
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairpersons:
Ida Marie Høeg and Magdalena Nordin
ida.m.hoeg@uia.no
University of Agder
The three Baltic States have been consistently characterized as religiously diverse societies, including secular Estonia, religiously plural Latvia, and Catholic-majority Lithuania. However, academic discussions of the religious life of these societies go beyond the visible statistical landscape, including the historical, sociological, and structural factors that lay the groundwork for it, as well as the phenomena and groups that exist alongside it. Another missing point in these discussions is the role of the researcher of religion and the theoretical and empirical methodologies applied in the Baltic States. This session calls for a theoretical and empirical discussion of research on minority (non)religion in the Baltic States, the role of the researcher, and the approaches applied. Particularly, the comparative research would be of interest, but not limited to.
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairperson:
Milda Ališauskienė
milda.alisauskiene@vdu.lt
Vytautas Magnus University
Nordic countries are considered the most secularized region in Europe, often measured by changes in beliefs, practices, and identities. However, secularization and religious change affect not only people’s behaviors and beliefs but also the ways they speak about matters that are important to them and the world around them. Additionally, (non)religious vocabulary is shaped by globalization, mediatization, and other processes, meaning that different generations may address the same ideas using completely different terminology. This panel invites papers that examine how people discuss (non)religious matters and what these discussions reveal about society in general, as well as methods for studying the language of (non)religion in the context of religious complexity.
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairperson:
Atko Remmel
atko.remmel@ut.ee
University of Tartu
This panel explores how ritual practices do not simply constitute our objects of study, but actively guide, shape, and unsettle our research in the field. Rather than treating rituals, everyday religious practices, and embodied routines as static “data”, we ask what happens when these practices become methodological tools, ethical challenges, and sites of co-presence between researchers and interlocutors.
We invite papers that engage with lived religion in a wide sense, from formal liturgies to informal gatherings, from diasporic prayer circles and commemorative events to digital rituals, domestic routines, and improvised acts of devotion or dissent. The panel is particularly interested in contributions that reflect on immersion and embodiment, moments when researchers join in, stand back, hesitate, or refuse participation, and the methodological, political, and affective questions that follow.
Possible themes include, but are not limited to, ritual participation, partial participation, or refusal as method, sensory, emotional, and relational dimensions of immersion, negotiating belonging, difference, and power through shared practices, lived religion in minority, diasporic, secular, or contested contexts, digital and mediated rituals and their methodological challenges, and reflexive accounts of fieldwork shaped by prayer, festivals, mourning, protest, or everyday routines.
We welcome contributions from anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and related disciplines, and encourage submissions that foreground reflexive, collaborative, or experimental approaches. By bringing together diverse case studies and methodological reflections, the panel aims to show how being “guided by ritual” can deepen our understanding of lived religion and reconfigure what counts as fieldwork.
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairperson:
Sumeera Hassan
sumeera.hassan@helsinki.fi
University of Helsinki
Research with indigenous people in the Nordic countries and elsewhere have brought important substantive and methodological questions into focus. Indigenous studies have been largely neglected in the sociology of religion in the Nordic countries. This may reflect enduring colonial divisions of academic labour, in which the study of Indigenous religions was traditionally assigned to anthropology and religious studies.
The session actualizes questions concerning the position of the researcher vis-a-vis research participants in marginalized positions. It also invites reflection on the shifting boundaries between research on and with minority populations, including the blurred boundaries and complexities between academic work and activism.
- What insights do Indigenous and postcolonial perspectives offer into debates on positionality, insider/outsider dynamics, and the relationship between research and activism?
- How can sociology of religion contribute relevant and responsible knowledge – and to whom?
- How might insights from Indigenous studies inform research on both minority and majority populations?
We welcome papers that reflects upon research on religion in Sápmi, Greenland/Kalaallit Nunaat, other Nordic national minorities and indigenous peoples elsewhere are also welcome.
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairperson:
Lars Laird Iversen
lars.l.iversen@mf.no
Nordic Association for the Sociology of Religion – MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society
Research with indigenous people in the Nordic countries and elsewhere has brought important substantive findings. Research on religion and worldviews has disproportionately centered populations from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Developed (WEIRD) countries, creating significant gaps in our understanding of marginalized communities. As societies become increasingly diverse —culturally, linguistically, and in terms of worldviews — but also as a result of growing socio-economic differences, empirical research is required that challenges this bias. However, moving beyond WEIRD-centric approaches requires more than acknowledging geographic or cultural categories; it demands critical reflection on how our methodological choices, ethical frameworks, and researcher positionalities shape knowledge production and whose voices remain heard or silenced.
In two sessions, we examine the methodological, epistemological, and ethical complexities of conducting research with vulnerable and hard-to-reach populations. We encourage explorations of how researchers navigate multiple tensions: building trust across perceived differences while maintaining ethical rigor; ensuring voluntary participation and safeguarding privacy in contexts where legal frameworks like GDPR and national ethical legislation serve simultaneously as protections and obstacles; and developing sustainable, valid, and reliable methods that genuinely center marginalized experiences rather than reproducing academic hegemonies throughout research projects. Key questions guide our focus in these sessions: How do we define and sample non-WEIRD populations without reinforcing their marginalization? What can a common epistemic horizon between research and participant refer to? What does “safety” mean for both participants and researchers in diverse fieldwork contexts? How can research practices embody decolonial principles in preparation and practice, moving beyond performative gestures toward substantive engagement with community knowledge and priorities?
Through examining concrete empirical research, fieldwork experiences, and collaborative approaches, this session addresses the epistemic dissonance that arises when academic research paradigms encounter complex, intersectional realities, risking failure in validity. The session includes presentations drawing on experiences from the RelEx project on religion and social exclusion at Åbo Akademi University, but also invites presentations engaging directly with these complex issues.
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairperson:
Peter Nynäs
peter.nynas@abo.fi
Åbo Akademi University
The sense of safety is an essential foundation for human flourishing and well-being in individuals, communities, and in societies. However, social, political, and health-related global transformations, and polarization have eroded deeply not only safety but our sense of safety. Religious spaces have a huge potential for creating embodied sense of safety – but also tensions and unsecurity. Thus they form an intriguing context to explore the foundations of sense of safety. Religious embodied social spaces have symbolic weight, and combine layers of emotional regimes (Riis & Woodhead 2011), thus making the contestations related to them observable in physical realities.
This session invites contributions that examine how sense of safety is constructed, negotiated, and contested in and around religious spaces. We welcome empirical studies, theoretical explorations, and methodological innovations that address questions such as:
- How do different actors (worshippers, religious authorities, state institutions, communities) construct competing or overlapping notions of safety in religious spaces?
- How do religious spaces navigate tensions between openness and security, hospitality and boundary-maintenance etc.?
- In what ways do intersecting identities (gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability) shape experiences of safety and belonging in religious contexts?
We particularly encourage papers that employ novel methodological approaches, and those that explore underexamined contexts or religious traditions.
Session Format: Standard paper presentation
Session Chairperson:
|
Henrietta Grönlund |
Jenni Spännäri |
If none of the existing sessions fit your paper, you may submit it to the ‘open/miscellaneous session’ that will be convened by the committee organizing the conference. This open session allows for all themes relevant to the conference’s main theme, Research Approaches, Design and Methodology in the Sociology of Religion: Centering the Marginalized, Vulnerable and Socially Excluded.
Please note that the organizing committee also maintains the right to refer the paper to an existing session.
Session Chair:
NCSR Organizing Committee
NCSR2026@abo.fi
Closed Sessions
Not open for paper submission
