This conference will convene scholars and artists to consider the theoretical and practical work of centering the Black sacred arts in the academy. It will explore methods to incorporate the study and practice of the Black sacred arts in curricula and public life with the aim of uncovering new methodologies, epistemologies and pedagogies. 

The conference highlights 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.

Ritual transformations of consciousness (RTC)—often referred to in the literature as spirit possession, mediumship, more rarely shamanism; more broadly as trance, ecstasy, and altered states of consciousness—have, when addressed as elements of African and African Diasporic religions, long been the racialized domain of the Other; evolutionarily prior, a site of precarity or state of incompleteness for a developing rationality.

Healing in African and African Diasporic religions encompasses a wide variety of rituals and practices. Rites of healing can involve allopathic, homeopathic, and therapeutic measures that pertain to the individual as well as the collective.