The Department of Religious Studies is pleased to be hosting the British Association for the Study of Religions (BASR) annual conference from the 7-9 September at the University of Kent’s Canterbury campus.

The conference will explore the theme of ‘Religion in the Local and Global’ across a range of disciplinary perspectives, including religion, politics, anthropology, sociology, psychology and philosophy. The aim is to bring together a range of disciplinary perspectives on the study of religion to explore the local/global challenge to conventional assumptions about religion, both in empirical and theoretical perspectives. Each perspective seeks to set up a challenge to how different ways of thinking about religion are determined by interlocking global and local issues, concerns and social realities.

The conference will feature three keynote speakers: Professor Tulasi Srinivas (Emeron College, USA) on ‘The Cow in the Elevator: Wonder, Creativity and Ethical Life in a Capitalist World’, Professor Mia Lovheim (University of Uppsala, Sweden), on ‘Religion and Mediatized Publics’, and Professor Peter van der Veer (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany) on ‘Religion and the City: A Comparative Perspective on Asia and the Rest’.

BASR aims to promote the academic study of religions through the international collaboration of all scholars whose research has a bearing on the subject.

Full details of the conference and the programme of events can be found at: blogs.kent.ac.uk/basr-conference