20th ISSRNC Annual Conference. Fundations and Fluidity.

The 20th Annual Conference of ISSNC (International Society for the Study forReligion, Natura and Culture), will take place on 10th-14th October 2026 in Venice (Italy). 

Michele Rigodanzo, a member of MiDiS and a PhD student at DISUM, will participate as a speaker in the panel “Traditions in Motion: Religion, Ecology, and Environmental Practice” with a paper entitled “Religion and the Monitoring of Unequal Access to a Healthy Environment: The United Church of Christ’s Reports on Toxic Exposure (1987–2020).”

The paper examines how the United Church of Christ (UCC)’s monitoring of unequal access to a healthy environment in the United States documented existing disparities and contributed to the development of interpretative categories, such as environmental racism, that have had a lasting impact on public and academic debate. Specifically, it reconstructs the evolution of thematic priorities and the ways in which the problem of unequal access has been defined over time. The case study highlights how religious actors can contribute to the definition of environmental problems by actively participating in the definition of the categories through which ecological inequalities are understood and addressed.

Further information is available here.