About the Event
This session (during the 2026 AAR Online June Sessions) invites four graduate students to do something religious studies rarely makes institutional space for: speculate concretely about what the field could become. Rather than rehearsing familiar critiques, each presenter begins from a single tangible change in how we structure graduate education, organize knowledge, relate to publics, or sustain scholarly lives, and traces its implications forward in a creative, experimental form. The session practices futuring as method in the disciplined imagination of alternatives grounded in changes we could actually make. Together, these four short presentations compose a speculative map of the fields we might build from the one we’ve inherited. Following the presentations, the session opens into a guided conversation among presenters and attendees, inviting the room to think together about the futures we want to choose and what it would take to build them.
Event Guidelines
The Online June Sessions of the Annual Meeting will have everything you expect from our traditional annual meetings, including nearly 60 sessions and a presidential panel. Share innovative scholarship, network with colleagues and mentors, collaborate, and learn in a fully accessible environment.
