Ecologies, Environmentalisms, and the Black Sacred Arts conference

From May 13-15, 2024, Yale Institute of Sacred Music’s third conference on the Black sacred arts will convene scholars and artists in New Haven, CT to explore connections between the Black sacred arts, ecology, and environmental concerns.

Keynote speakers will include Tracey Hucks, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Dianne M. Stewart, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Emory University.

The conference will highlight research and practice from multi-religious perspectives and disparate geographies in the Black Atlantic that consider links between expressive cultures and topics such as climate change, the biodiversity crisis, the human and more-than-human nexus, extractive capitalism in Africa and its diaspora, and links between ecology and ritual material culture. We aim to encourage interdisciplinary conversations about entanglements between the Black sacred arts, ecology, and environmental issues via sonic, visual, and other sensoria that cut across religious, geographic, or other social categories throughout the Black Atlantic and beyond. Proposals on any confluence of religion, ecology, and environmentalism ranging from studies of Black Buddhism to Islam, and research on the Black Church to Santería are welcome.