Race, Ethnicity, Religion - Categories of Descent-Based Difference

Call for Abstracts

Categories of Descent-Based Difference: Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and Ethnoreligion

Two-day workshop, University of Bern

October 27 & 28 2026

Across Europe – and elsewhere – politically significant boundaries often turn on forms of belonging treated as inherited: ethnic, religious, ethnoreligious, or mixed. The oppression organised through such boundaries is sometimes described as racism, even when it does not map neatly onto the colour line. This raises a general question about how race, ethnicity, religion, and ethnoreligion relate to one another. Do they name distinct kinds of group, overlapping forms of classification, or different configurations of descent-based difference? Under what conditions do ethnic or religious groups become racialised?

This workshop invites papers addressing these questions. Bosnia and Herzegovina offers one revealing example. The categories Bosniak, Croat, and Serb draw together national belonging, religious affiliation, family history, and attributed descent. They shape political membership, yet are neither simply religious nor straightforwardly racial categories. Belief, practice, self-identification, and classification by others need not coincide, while institutions and social practices may nevertheless treat membership as inherited and enduring. The same problem arises, in different forms, well beyond Southeast Europe.

Over recent decades, philosophers have developed sophisticated accounts of race and racialisation. Ethnicity, religious belonging, and ethnoreligion have been studied extensively in history, sociology, anthropology, and religious studies. Although philosophers have compared race and ethnicity, religion and ethnoreligion have seldom been included in the same social-ontological analysis.  Building on Maneri and Morning’s (2022, 2024) proposal to compare concepts of descent-based difference, the workshop asks whether these categories can be analysed within a common frame.

One possible point of comparison is descent-based ascription: the construction of group membership as genealogically inherited and transmitted across generations. This need not involve belief in biological descent. Names, religious practices, language, culture, place of origin, and family history may instead become signs of inherited membership. We take this proposal as a starting point for exploring the relations among race, ethnicity, and religion, rather than as a framework to be assumed. What can descent-based ascription explain about these groups, and which differences does it obscure? How does racialisation interact with ethnic, religious, or ethnoreligious classification, and what follows for debates about racism?

Southeast Europe, especially former Yugoslavia, will provide one comparative point of reference. We welcome work on European and extra-European contexts more broadly, including papers that develop, challenge, or mark the limits of the proposed framework.

Topics

Possible topics include:

• the ontology of racial, ethnic, religious, and ethnoreligious groups;
• descent, inheritance, ascription, conversion, voluntary exit, and the relation between self-identification and classification by others;
• mixed, contested, or changing group membership;
• the persistence, transformation, division, merger, or disappearance of social kinds;
• racialisation, ethnification, confessionalisation, and related processes of group construction;
• criteria for distinguishing racialisation from ethnification, confessionalisation, and other forms of group construction;
• whether and when religion, ethnicity, or culture becomes genealogically coded;
• how the ontology of descent-based groups bears on distinctions between racism and other forms of oppression;
• objections and alternatives to treating these categories as members of a wider family.

We particularly welcome papers that expose the limits of the proposed framework or offer a different account. We also welcome historically and empirically grounded papers that use their cases to develop, test, or challenge an explicit conceptual or ontological claim.

Format

Papers will be allocated 30 minutes for presentation, followed by 30 minutes for discussion.

Confirmed speakers:

Ann Morning (CUNY)

Adam Hochman (Macquarie University)

Vita Zalar (European University Institute)

Submissions

Please submit:

• an anonymised abstract of no more than 500 words, clearly stating the paper’s central question, main claim, and contribution to the workshop’s conceptual or ontological agenda;
• a separate document containing your name, institutional affiliation, career stage, and a short biographical note.

Send submissions to [email protected] by September 6 2026. Decisions will be communicated by September 16.

We especially encourage submissions from early-career researchers, precariously employed or independent scholars, and researchers working on regions and traditions underrepresented in contemporary social ontology.

Funding

Funding covering travel and accommodation costs is available for a limited number of early-career and underfunded researchers. Please indicate in the separate document if your participation depends being partly or fully funded.

Organisation

Armin Mašala, University of Bern

Daniel James, Freie Universität Berlin