Call for Papers: Religion and Poverty (Special Issue of Palgrave Communications)

Together with two colleagues from the CEPR I will edit a thematic collection on religion and poverty in Palgrave Communications. Palgrave Communications is an interdsiciplinary, double-blind peer reviewed and fully open access journal in the humanities and social sciences, published by Palgrave Macmillan (an I am one of its Associate Editors).

​It is expected that the thematic collection will be published in Mid 2018. Submissions are possible on an ongoing basis, the deadline for submission of full papers is 30 September 2017, but papers submitted later can also be included since Palgrave Communications is an online-only journal. All papers will be screened by the editors and undergo rigorous peer-review.

For more infromation on the submission process please see the submission guidelines of Palgrave Communications. Find the detailed call for papers for this thematic collection below, and on the homepage of Palgrave communications.

Latest deadline for article proprosals: September 31, 2017.

Submission deadline: From September 2017, although earlier submissions are welcomed.

Editors: Dr Gottfried Schweiger and Dr Helmut P Gaisbauer (Centre for Ethic and Poverty Research, University of Salzburg); Prof Clemens Sedmak (Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King's College London/Centre for Ethics and Poverty Research, University of Salzburg).

Poverty and religion are interrelated in different ways. On the one hand, for various religious traditions poverty is both an aspect of a particular faithful life (e.g. monastic communities) and giving to the poor is seen as a religious duty. Such traditions have evolved over time and expanded the role of faith-based organisations nowadays play in welfare provision and international development. Faith-based organizations play an important role in poverty alleviation both in rich and poor countries. These actions and practices, as well as their religious and theological underpinnings, deserve scrutiny. On the other hand, religion plays an important role in the life of people living in poverty: how they experience and shape their living, and how they find their place in society and the communities in which they. The role of religion in justifying certain inequalities and processes of exclusion (e.g. in India) and thus contributing to the sustainability of poverty is another important theme worth reflection.


We invite papers, from a range of disciplinary perspectives, that consider the following overarching question: how can religion be used as a vehicle to overcome structures of poverty, and how does it sometimes hinder such processes?


Contributions from sociology, development studies, religious studies, economics, theology, and other social sciences and humanities are welcomed; as are insights from different geographical settings, forms of poverty, and religious traditions.


This special issue is run in collaboration with the 2017 Salzburg Conference on Interdisciplinary Poverty Research, organised by the Centre for Ethics and Poverty Research of the University of Salzburg.