Intellectual Brokerage between Religious Thinkers, Social Theorists, and Practitioners

How does a concept travel between a religious tradition and a secular social theory, and what happens to it along the way? This call for abstracts seeks empirical cases of intellectual brokering and adds a third party too often left out: the secular and religious practitioners, jurists, and certifiers who move such concepts in their work, such as the sharia scholar engineering an Islamic bank’s financial product.

Two lines of research are sought. The first concerns intellectual brokerage in which religious, theological, or metaphysical concepts are imported to clarify, extend, or unsettle secular social theory. The second, in the opposite direction, concerns brokerage from secular theories and laws to reinterpret and apply metaphysical concepts. In both, the central empirical question is how such brokering is accomplished (e.g., through translation, analogy, certification, adjudication, or contestation), including the methodological and epistemological commitments that make collaboration across ontological difference possible.

I especially encourage ethnographic, historical, and other empirically grounded submissions, including those in which religious thinkers, secular theorists, and practitioners produce concepts together. Within that, I welcome submissions that decenter the field by investigating religious and metaphysical traditions outside North Atlantic Christianity, including non-theistic, non-doctrinal, and Indigenous traditions, and that address asymmetries of power/knowledge in brokerage. The ISA World Congress’s host city of Gwangju is itself instructive for our session: a setting where Confucian, Protestant, Catholic, Buddhist, and shamanic concepts circulate widely side by side.