Dis-ruptures
2024 Conference Recap
All,
The 21st Biennial ISRLC Conference finished on Sunday, 8th of September, in the resplendent warmth and sun of the Danish countryside. Over four active days, participants explored the conference’s thematic question – The Irreplicable Human/-ities? – within the serene environment of Hotel Rebild Bakker, nestled in the forested region of northern Jutland. Fourteen different panels and two plenaries structured the daytime events, while evening conversations over food and drink widened the more formal presentations within a relaxed and, in many cases, deeper set of discussions and cross-fertilised interests. In sum, the conference offered a rich and stimulating, at times provocative and unsettling, interrogation into the nature of what it means to be human in the 21st century and the implications this has for the future of the Humanities.
In the opening plenary session, which set the conference in motion Thursday afternoon, seven different panel convenors offered their perspective on the issues at stake in current trajectories of modern technology, as these have forced us to reassess our understanding of humanness, and how as scholars we ought to go about studying this humanness. Ideas ranged from a defence of what the Humanities have traditionally been able to offer, to concerns around justice and freedom, to considerations of what constitutes a posthuman reality, to the nature of irreplicability within such arts as music, to a revival of hermeneutics as part of an existential questioning, to the displacement, or being made homeless, from our comfortable conceptions, to queer notions of an inhumanities and of undisciplines.
In the keynote address Saturday afternoon, Prof. Timothy Beal (Case Western Reserve) challenged us to think with, not against, new technological developments such as artificial intelligence. By way of demonstration, inspiration and provocation, he showcased ways we as scholars in the Humanities might repurpose certain concepts (e.g. generativity, process and attention) to build things that facilitate difficulty, frustrate felicitousness, and resist automation – all by engaging with machine intelligence rather than ignoring or dismissing it. Daunting as it may seem to those of us who feel machine technology is increasingly beyond our grasp, Prof. Beal’s address was a call to action – participate in the processes, as experts in process over product.
As the conference ended with a heightened sense of the interdisciplinary possibilities we bring to the table as Humanities scholars, we are extremely grateful to Marianne Schleicher and her University of Aarhus team for organising such a well-run event to ensure those possibilities had a chance to flourish clearly and inspiringly. The logistics involved in gathering 70+ international scholars to such a distinct location, removed from any urban centre, were considerable. Yet all participants agreed that the strong organisation of our hosts made this conference a highly enjoyable, motivating, and, to borrow a central term from the keynote, generative experience. Thanks to Marianne again for all her and her team’s hard work.
As per our constitution, Marianne will now take over the vice-president’s role, in support of the new incoming president yet to be determined. We are grateful to our out-going vice-president Alana Vincent, who has given many years of service to the Society in several capacities. We also want to acknowledge again Sage Elwell’s many efforts in revamping the Society’s website, which you all will have appreciated even if not a participant in Denmark.
The site for our next conference in 2026, and thus the person who will become the new president, are still being negotiated, though we have at least one frontrunner. As per tradition it should return to the UK, and we hope to be able to announce the precise location very soon. Please stay tuned.
If you were unable to join us in Denmark this year, we sincerely hope that you put aside time in your 2026 calendars– probably in October some time – as well as in your budgeting, to attend the next iteration. As participating members will tell you, the conferences are high points in our academic schedules; they help to revive us in what is so often, and increasingly, a burdensome institutional climate. This year was no exception. We thus hope as many of you as possible will join the continuing interdisciplinary conversations and camaraderie that are unique to the ISRLC.
With warm wishes,
Andrew Hass
22nd ISRLC Biennial Conference
University of Stirling, Scotland
September 10-13, 2026
Ruptures abound. Across the globe, established orders have been split apart; norms have been torn asunder. Complex and hard-won institutional bodies long thought stable – governments and civic systems; international organisations, agreements and alliances – have been stress-tested beyond their limits, their fractures and frailty newly exposed. Such ruptures can both liberate and destroy. They can offer overdue reckonings, openings through which long-silenced voices can assert themselves. And yet they can also have devastating consequences, leading to further wars and war crimes (as seen in Gaza and Ukraine; as seen with the Uyghurs and Rohingya), ecological disasters (as seen in the increasing climate crises), individual and collective traumas (as seen in the growing rates of mental illness, political polarization, economic crises, social [media] breakdown).
The 22nd biennial ISRLC conference aims to bear witness to this complex climate of upheaval and rupturing. As we consider the fault lines along which these ruptures take place, we want to ask where our interdisciplinary work across religion, theology, literature, the arts and culture can both probe and suture the splits and fractures we have become witness to. How might our scholarship render or facilitate these opposing moves, or discern when one is more appropriate than the other? “O body / always healing despite me”, writes the poet Kemi Alabi: how might our research, our teaching, our creativity, disrupt the ruptures?
In confronting our contemporary crisis of a riven world order, we confront the question of how to recapture our fundamental interconnectedness with each other and with the other-than-human. Amid the dismantling of social contracts once deemed untouchable, amid a continuing disregard for how we responsibly interact with nature and our environment, how might we revive what much religious sensibility has sought for: a heightened sense of connected bodies – individual, communal, institutional, planetary? In Catherine Keller’s words, how might we “seek to perform the entanglement of our differences: to activate entanglement as solidarity” (Intercarnations, 199)?
And how do we balance such entanglement with ruptures of critique – ruptures that break apart not only the status quo but also authoritarian and autocratic forces? Can we open up further space for minor ruptures of resistance in daily rhetoric and human exchange, for voices of ethical critique that rupture the engines of crisis? Can we provide critical language that challenges the increasing forces of disconnection and inspires us to imagine or create new forms of contact? In continuity with our 2024 conference, Judith Butler’s words of decades ago seem more relevant than ever:
If the humanities has a future as cultural criticism, and cultural criticism has a task at the present moment, it is no doubt to return us to the human where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense. We would have to interrogate the emergence and vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know, what we can hear, what we can see, what we can sense. (Precarious Life, 2004, 151)
_______________
The 2026 conference and its many panels invite contributions from all traditions and from all corners of the globe – with interdisciplinary and creative approaches especially encouraged – that touch upon this theme of rupture and dis-rupture, keeping in mind Yeats’ words: “nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent”.
[Note: Specific panel Call for Papers will be issued in the coming summer months. Proposals must be submitted to panel convenors only, who will fashion their calls from this theme. So please stay tuned. Further details, including keynote speakers, will be forthcoming. For general enquiries, please email Andrew Hass – andrew.hass@stir.ac.uk.]