Enchanting the Social: Rituals for Collective Life

In this one-day symposium, we will explore how rituals—broadly conceived—help produce, stabilise, and transform collective life. While some panels will examine explicitly ceremonial or spiritual practices, we are equally interested in the more ordinary, patterned repetitions through which social worlds are made. From habits of care to public performances, from activist repertoires to institutional routines, these practices shape how people imagine futures, sustain solidarities, and navigate political and ecological uncertainty. Through round-table discussions and moments of participatory practice, we aim to develop sociological reflections on how rituals—whether spectacular or mundane—organise social relations, generate affective bonds, and materialise forms of collective agency. By bringing together scholars who study everyday social processes with those examining more overtly symbolic or aesthetic forms of ritual, the event opens space to consider how repetition, performance, and shared practice give political life its texture. We hope this conversation will connect critical sociology with practitioners and thinkers experimenting with new ways of remaking social and ecological relations. 

The Symposium is also supported by the Forum on Decentering the Human at QMUL.

Organisers: Giulia Carabelli and Jamie Matthews.

When: 22 April 2026.

Where: Queen Mary University of London, Queens Building, Colette Bowe Room, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS 

Register here

Panel 1 - Magic, Rituals and the Mystical

This panel opens the symposium by engaging ritual in its more explicitly mystical, spiritual, and esoteric forms. Contributions will explore practices such as religious devotion, enchantment, witchcraft, and ceremonial magic across historical and contemporary contexts. In hearing from speakers working on past and present, Global South and North, within different academic disciplines and beyond them, the session considers how ritual mediates a range of social challenges, and offers imaginative resources for navigating social, political, and ecological crises.

Panel 2 - Performing Society - Rituals of Social Life

Rituals and enchantments may be spectacular, but they are also those more commonplace practices giving rhythm and texture to society and our everyday lives. This panel examines how social life is continually made and remade through repetition and performance. Speakers consider how urban temporalities, gendered performances, sensory experience, and collective memory function as ritualised processes gathering and producing societies and their politics. Together, these contributions explore how seemingly ordinary practices organise collective life, shape belonging, and open (or constrain) possibilities for social transformation.

Session 3 - Plastique Fantastique

The final session turns toward experimental, practice-based approaches to ritual and collective life. Plastique Fantastique present work from Sustainable Magic Against Unsustainable Economic Realism, a performative gathering combining storytelling, sigil magic, and participatory ritual. Engaging themes such as collective imagination, alternative economies, and temporary community-making, this session invites reflection on ritual as a tool for imagining and enacting possible futures in times of crisis.

Programme:

10:00 - 10:30            Arrival and coffee

10:30 - 11:00            Opening Remarks 

11:00 - 12:30            Panel 1 - Magic, Rituals, and the Mystical

Chair: Giulia Carabelli (QMUL) 

Speakers: Çiçek Ilengiz (Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin), Jabulani Shaba (Groningen), Delfi Nieto-Isabel (QMUL), Zoë de Luca Legge (Ecotransfeminist Curator)

12:30 - 13:30            Lunch

13:30 - 15:00            Panel 2 - Performing Society - Rituals of Social Life

Chair: Jamie Matthews (QMUL)

Speakers: Vikki Bell (Goldsmiths), Dawn Lyon (Sussex/Kent), Liz McDonnell (Sussex), Alex Rhys-Taylor (Goldsmiths)

15:00 - 15:15           Break

15:15 - 16:15           Presentation by Plastique Fantastique - Rituals, Sigil Magic, and Storytelling

16:15 - 16:45           Concluding thoughts