Basit Kareem Iqbal

Studies of migration have long demonstrated that, despite the protocols of international human rights discourse, displacement is rarely followed by emplacement: the vast majority of refugees do not resettle nor return, while other migrants do not simply assimilate into their new contexts. We must thus understand displacement with its aftermath: with attention to the temporalities of suspension, anticipation, and belatedness. Meanwhile, methodological interventions in the anthropology of religion have insisted that we abandon conventional narratives of secular progress, in order to think speculatively with the conceptual archives of religious traditions and communities (in all their simultaneous indeterminacy and coherence). This workshop, to be held at McMaster University in May 2026 and building toward a journal special issue, brings together these separate disciplinary conversations. Scholars of migration and scholars of religion will discuss precirculated papers that explore the everyday poetic and eschatological resonances of displacements and aftermaths. We will foreground three aspects in our conversation: poetics (representation, genre, narrative); political theology (emergent formations of sovereignty, at the threshold of the human); and form of life (constitutive tensions striating collective experience). Explored together, these three workshop themes promise to develop a new interface between scholarly fields for ethnographically thinking displacement and aftermath.