The Center for Media, Religion, and Culture 
University of Colorado Boulder 

October 20-23, 2026

In a sermon he delivered at the Trinity Church in New York City, Fred Moten (2020) reminded congregants of the meaning of fellowship and "why we come together." In recounting a personal story of how a community in his native Arkansas gathered one day to the surprise of his mother to complete the work on his deceased grandfather's garden, Moten emphasized the true value of collecting and responding to the call as communities working together not only to overturn the soil and help a family cope with its grief, but to overturn the order of a turbulent world. He says: "…maybe we can begin again deeply to consider what it is to have been called, what it is to have been or be collected, gathered… [we come together] to take note of that and not only to wonder at it and be thankful for it, but also to consider what form call and response must take for us now that the world is drowning and burning, freezing and melting, starving and engorging itself all at once."

Moten's sermon was entitled "This Is How We Fellowship," and we want to extend his provocation about what it means to "be in community" in our fractured world today. To take a term from bell hooks, we wonder where "homeplace" is in the midst of social fragmentation, genocide, and networked substitutes for belonging. At a time when communities continue to assemble along hardened lines of ethnicity, racial supremacy, religious nationalism, and other forms of bordered belonging, have we betrayed the meaning of community? At a time when social solidarities are impaired by crises of public welfare and logics of disposability and market dominance, what is the call of community? And at a time when our media ecosystems heighten both our connectivity and isolation, is there hope in a shared community?

In this world of dazzling acceleration and manufactured spectacles, where do we turn to imagine and build other bonds and beats of solidarity? In The Earthly Community (2023), Achille Mbembe argues that the world is facing a crisis of breathability-ecological, political, and spiritual. He warns against an anemic existence bent on enclosure, separation, and extraction. The Earth, he writes, is becoming "a universal necropolis": a space organized around death, exclusion, and the commodification of life itself. Mbembe's intervention is not merely ecological, but ontological and spiritual. He calls for the cultivation of what he terms an "earthly community" or "an assembly of the living," grounded in life-sustaining practices of interdependence, repair, and mutual care. Community for him is not a reaffirmation of sameness or sovereign autonomy, but a disposition toward radical relation-a mode of being-together that foregrounds porousness, reciprocity, and shared vulnerability through difference. The call to community is primarily a refusal of enclosure-an insistence on fellowship as a collective and life-affirming response to our planetary exhaustion. To take a term from bell hooks, we wonder where "homeplace" is in the midst of social fragmentation. 

We invite scholars, artists, activists, and media practitioners to reflect on the intersections of media, religion, and community-not as fixed categories, but as active and unstable formations through which people come together to struggle and to imagine otherwise. We are especially interested in work that explores how communities are mediated, fragmented, or newly constituted in our hypermediated moment.

We welcome proposals in a range of formats: individual papers, panels, roundtables, and experimental sessions. We are open to work that is conceptual, historical, ethnographic, or artistic in orientation, and encourage submissions from across disciplines, theoretical and empirical traditions, and geographic locations that engage with these questions and beyond. 

Possible topics could include but are not limited to the following: 

• Digital infrastructures and formations of religious publics and communities
• Community formation and the discourse of spirituality
• Religion, community formation and fragmentation
• Alternative forms of community outside of organized religion
• Community organizing/activism, media, and religion
• Secularism, religion and the negotiation of community spaces
• Media, algorithms, and rituals of community
• Feminist and LGBTQIA+ configurations of religious community
• Race, technology, spirituality and experiments of liberation
• Decolonial epistemologies and spiritual imaginaries of relation
• Archives and mediated practices of historical repair
• Mediated ecologies of community and care in the context of planetary crisis
• Speculative media and pluriversal visions of community

This will be the twelfth in a series of successful international conferences held by the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture in Boulder. The previous meetings have brought together an interdisciplinary community of scholars for focused conversations on emerging issues in media and religion. Each has proven to be an important landmark in the development of theory and method in its respective area and has resulted in important collaborations, publications, and resources for further research and dialogue. 

Submission Guidelines

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words, along with a short bio (100 words), by May 22, 2026. Panel proposals (3–4 presenters) should include a 250-word overview and individual abstracts for each paper. Roundtable and non-traditional session formats (e.g., workshops, performances, screenings) are welcome and should include a 300–500-word proposal outlining the session's aims, format, and participants.

Send all submissions and inquiries to: cmrc@colorado.edu

Featured speakers

Fred Moten is professor of performance studies and comparative literature at New York University. His teaching and writing focus on poetics, aesthetics, Black studies, and critical theory. He is the author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003); Black and Blur (2017); Stolen Life (2018); The Universal Machine (2018); The Undercommons and All Incomplete co-authored with Stefano Harney. Moten is a 2020 MacArthur Fellow, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, and a critically-acclaimed poet and jazz musician. His scholarly and creative practice deeply engages with Black life through its music, rituals, forms of gathering, and sociality. He has worked with many artist collectives and study groups, including the Anti-Colonial Machine, the Black Arts Movement School Modality, the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy, the Jazz Study Group, and Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective.

Stefano Harney is a teacher and writer who works collaboratively and collectively in the classroom, in research, and in social practice. He is a black studies scholar who has taught in the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, art criticism, American Studies, and business & management. Stefano has held appointments at Pace University and at CUNY in the US, at the University of Leicester and Queen Mary University of London in the UK, at Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia, at Ton Duc Thang University in Vietnam, and at Singapore Management University in Singapore. He is co-author with Fred Moten of The Undercommons: fugitive planning and black study (2013) and of All Incomplete (2021) both from Minor Compositions/Autonomedia Press.