Call for papers

Session “Visualizing conflicts and apocalypses. Religion and visual arts in a Polarized World”

Deadline 20 December

International Society for the Sociology of Religion

June 30 – July 4, 2025 Kaunas (Lithuania)

Organized by Francesco Piraino – University of Bologna and Kees de Groot – Tilburg University

For many years the relationship between popular culture, visual arts, and religion was not considered relevant by social scientists. This was probably due for several reasons. First, popular culture has been considered only an expression of mass culture determined by capitalist market (see Eco 1964 for a critique). Secondly, scholars considered mass culture and religion as antithetical, conceptualizing popular culture as only as an instrument to challenge religious institutions. Thirdly, scholars considered popular culture as an expression of secularization, commodification, and banalization of religious phenomena (Hjarvard 2012). This perspective has been questioned in the last ten years by scholars who nuanced the boundaries between high and lowbrow cultures and described the complicated relationship between popular culture, arts, and the religious sphere, showing how religion is represented, challenged, but also imagined and lived by authors and the audience (de Groot 2023; McGuire 2008; Piraino 2023; Kokkinen 2013; Partridge 2014). This panel would like to foster this new approach, focusing in particular on the representation of crises, tensions, polarizations and apocalypses in visual arts. In fact, the end of the world, as the clash between the forces of evil and good, are at the center of both religious narratives and artistic plots. This panel aims to explore the aesthetic representations of global crises and their social construction.

Among the subjects that we wish to discuss there are:

• Aesthetics of the end of the world: between art and religious doctrines
• Art as a form of religious mediation: healing the world with art
• Art as a form religious mediatization: representing and misrepresenting religion
• Art as provocation against religion and morality
• The political impact of art and popular culture beyond the frame of consumerism • Art between liquid and institutional religions

For submitting a proposal please follow the instructions here:

Conference 2025