About
Hosted at Yale University, the Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology reflects a desire to provide a space for students to engage in dynamic, interdisciplinary conversations across curricular boundaries, and strives to connect ethos with ethics, and ethics to applicable practicality. How do beliefs about the environment affect the use of and engagement with the natural world? As an international interdisciplinary conference, we host students researching Environmental Studies, Environmental Humanities, Forestry, Conservation, History, Historiography, Social Sciences, Food Studies, Philosophy, Ethics & Morals, Theology, Religious Studies, Animal Ethics, Law & Policy, and Business & Management, among others.
The conference strongly encourages interdisciplinary work across these topics to reflect the interdisciplinary nature of this conference. Presenters range from undergraduate students to PhD candidates, and even include recent graduates who are implementing this academic work in the workplace. GCRE is organized jointly between the Yale School of Divinity and Yale School of the Environment.
Background
The field of Religion and Ecology addresses some of the most complex challenges of our time. Established by the Religions of the World and Ecology conference series at Harvard University from 1996-1998, this new field retrieves, re-evaluates, and reconstructs narratives, practices, and worldviews that influence relationships between human society and the environment.
Following the 20th anniversary conference of the World Religion and Ecology Conference series at Harvard, the Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology was founded at Yale in 2017. Organized by graduate students at Yale University, this venue provides graduate and undergraduate students from across the world with their own collegial space in which to share original research and develop meaningful discourse. Hosted annually, the GCRE is a space for students to engage in dynamic, interdisciplinary conversations across curricular boundaries.