Dis-ruptures
Registration for the 22nd Biennial Conference of ISRLC, 10-13th September 2026, is at long last open! Please see the following link:
Dis-ruptures | University of Stirling Online Shop
Conference Package
The conference venue will be similar to 2024 in Denmark, that is, all-inclusive. This means the following is part of your package: accommodation at special conference rates; Thursday dinner; Friday and Saturday breakfast/lunch/dinner; Sunday breakfast/lunch; morning and afternoon teas/coffees/biscuits; wine reception; delegate stationery and mineral water. They also include the ISRLC membership fee (£20) and other incidentals required to run the conference.
The fees do not include any travel to and from the venue.
Conference Schedule
The conference will begin at 4pm on Thursday 10th of September, and it will end on Sunday 13th at around 1pm after the business meeting, with a lunch to follow. A full daily schedule will be published closer to the conference dates.
Registration
Registration will take place in the Stirling Court Hotel’s lobby, beginning at 3.00pm on Thursday 10 September. A campus map showing the venue can be accessed here .
Bursaries
There are limited funds available to support student and unwaged academics. If you feel your circumstances merit support, please click HEREto download the bursary form, fill in all sections, and return to Lois McFarland by the 30th of June. Please note that, given our limited resources this year, we cannot fund travel costs: only relief for registration fees will be offered. Please also note that successful bursary recipients will be expected to share a room with another participant (whether of their choice or otherwise).
Accommodation
The conference will be held at the Stirling Court Hotel on the beautiful campus of the University of Stirling. More information of the venue can be found on the “Location” tab when you register.
There are 95 rooms in the hotel, 26 of which are twin rooms, so total capacity can hold 121 participants. Since there are not a lot of accommodation options immediately surrounding the campus, we suggest you book early to ensure a place within the venue. We have been given a discounted rate, and so you’ll find that, when factoring in food, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a cheaper deal elsewhere.
If you wish to share a twin room, and you have a preferred participant you’d want to share with, please be sure to list the name (or several names as options) when you register under that category. Or you can drop Andrew Hass an email at andrew.hass@stir.ac.uk to ensure you are paired accordingly.
For those who are local and cannot attend the entire conference, day rates are available.
If you are coming from outside the UK and plan to arrive before Thursday, unfortunately the venue is fully booked with another conference, so you’d need to find accommodation in Stirling or in the city (Edinburgh/Glasgow) in which you land. If you plan to leave after the Sunday, the venue does have room, and you would book separately with the Stirling Court Hotel (Tel: +44 (0)1786 466000). But please be sure you mention you are with the ISRLC conference, quoting the reference number303379, as they will preserve the same room at the same conference rate, though you’ll have to pay VAT on top of this, as it is not going through the University’s conference account.
Travel
If travelling by air, you’ll have to land in either Glasgow (GLA) or Edinburgh (EDI), and take the train from Queen Street Station (Glasgow) or Waverley Station (Edinburgh), both of which are under an hour, though you’ll need also to get from the airport to the train station in town. For the bus from GLA to Queen Street, click HERE; for the bus from EDI to Waverley, click HERE, for the Tram from EDI to Waverley, click HERE.
Further information about getting to the University of Stirling campus (on all forms of transport) can be viewed here.
Conference Car Parking
Limited free parking is available for hotel residents in the car park at the Stirling Court Hotel. If you are NOT staying in conference accommodation, and you wish to bring a car to campus, we need your registration number at least two weeks in advance to ensure that you can park for free. If you don’t provide this, you will need to pay the daily rate of £5 for Thursday and Friday (Saturday and Sunday are free). To pay this you will be able to use the RingGo app to pay for parking in any of the campus carparks, and the RingGo code for Stirling University campus is 24015. All information about car parking and tariffs can be viewed here.
Internet Access
There is wireless internet access available on Stirling University campus via Eduroam.
Cancellation Policy
Cancellations and withdrawals are subject to the following cancellation policies:
Registration can be cancelled for a full refund up to6 weeks before the conference.
Within 6 weeks of the conference, the cancellation is 65% chargeable up until 7 days prior; thereafter it is 100% chargeable.
We look forward to seeing you in Stirling for the conference. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
Andrew Hass (andrew.hass@stir.ac.uk)
with Fiona Darroch, Alison Jasper, and Lois McFarland
Registration for the 22nd Biennial Conference of ISRLC, 10-13th September 2026, is at long last open! Please see the following link:
Dis-ruptures | University of Stirling Online Shop
Conference Package
The conference venue will be similar to 2024 in Denmark, that is, all-inclusive. This means the following is part of your package: accommodation at special conference rates; Thursday dinner; Friday and Saturday breakfast/lunch/dinner; Sunday breakfast/lunch; morning and afternoon teas/coffees/biscuits; wine reception; delegate stationery and mineral water. They also include the ISRLC membership fee (£20) and other incidentals required to run the conference.
The fees do not include any travel to and from the venue.
Conference Schedule
The conference will begin at 4pm on Thursday 10th of September, and it will end on Sunday 13th at around 1pm after the business meeting, with a lunch to follow. A full daily schedule will be published closer to the conference dates.
Registration
Registration will take place in the Stirling Court Hotel’s lobby, beginning at 3.00pm on Thursday 10 September. A campus map showing the venue can be accessed here .
Bursaries
There are limited funds available to support student and unwaged academics. If you feel your circumstances merit support, please click HEREto download the bursary form, fill in all sections, and return to Lois McFarland by the 30th of June. Please note that, given our limited resources this year, we cannot fund travel costs: only relief for registration fees will be offered. Please also note that successful bursary recipients will be expected to share a room with another participant (whether of their choice or otherwise).
Accommodation
The conference will be held at the Stirling Court Hotel on the beautiful campus of the University of Stirling. More information of the venue can be found on the “Location” tab when you register.
There are 95 rooms in the hotel, 26 of which are twin rooms, so total capacity can hold 121 participants. Since there are not a lot of accommodation options immediately surrounding the campus, we suggest you book early to ensure a place within the venue. We have been given a discounted rate, and so you’ll find that, when factoring in food, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a cheaper deal elsewhere.
If you wish to share a twin room, and you have a preferred participant you’d want to share with, please be sure to list the name (or several names as options) when you register under that category. Or you can drop Andrew Hass an email at andrew.hass@stir.ac.uk to ensure you are paired accordingly.
For those who are local and cannot attend the entire conference, day rates are available.
If you are coming from outside the UK and plan to arrive before Thursday, unfortunately the venue is fully booked with another conference, so you’d need to find accommodation in Stirling or in the city (Edinburgh/Glasgow) in which you land. If you plan to leave after the Sunday, the venue does have room, and you would book separately with the Stirling Court Hotel (Tel: +44 (0)1786 466000). But please be sure you mention you are with the ISRLC conference, quoting the reference number303379, as they will preserve the same room at the same conference rate, though you’ll have to pay VAT on top of this, as it is not going through the University’s conference account.
Travel
If travelling by air, you’ll have to land in either Glasgow (GLA) or Edinburgh (EDI), and take the train from Queen Street Station (Glasgow) or Waverley Station (Edinburgh), both of which are under an hour, though you’ll need also to get from the airport to the train station in town. For the bus from GLA to Queen Street, click HERE; for the bus from EDI to Waverley, click HERE, for the Tram from EDI to Waverley, click HERE.
Further information about getting to the University of Stirling campus (on all forms of transport) can be viewed here.
Conference Car Parking
Limited free parking is available for hotel residents in the car park at the Stirling Court Hotel. If you are NOT staying in conference accommodation, and you wish to bring a car to campus, we need your registration number at least two weeks in advance to ensure that you can park for free. If you don’t provide this, you will need to pay the daily rate of £5 for Thursday and Friday (Saturday and Sunday are free). To pay this you will be able to use the RingGo app to pay for parking in any of the campus carparks, and the RingGo code for Stirling University campus is 24015. All information about car parking and tariffs can be viewed here.
Internet Access
There is wireless internet access available on Stirling University campus via Eduroam.
Cancellation Policy
Cancellations and withdrawals are subject to the following cancellation policies:
Registration can be cancelled for a full refund up to6 weeks before the conference.
Within 6 weeks of the conference, the cancellation is 65% chargeable up until 7 days prior; thereafter it is 100% chargeable.
We look forward to seeing you in Stirling for the conference. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
Andrew Hass (andrew.hass@stir.ac.uk)
with Fiona Darroch, Alison Jasper, and Lois McFarland
22nd ISRLC Biennial Conference
University of Stirling, Scotland
September 10-13, 2026
Keynote Speakers:
Richard Kearney and Mayra Rivera
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 terror, wars and possible war crimes (as seen in Israel-Gaza and Ukraine-Russia; 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)
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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”.
Individual Call For Papers
Individual Call For Papers Below
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Continental Philosophy and Religion
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Religious Studies
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Theological Humanism
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Decolonising Religion, Literature and Culture
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Visual Arts & Material Culture
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Judaism
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Music
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Gender, Feminisms, and Queer
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Old and/or Revived European Religions
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Literature
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Biblical Studies
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Wor(l)d crises
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Asian Religions
Description goes here -
Environment and Ecocriticism