Arihanta Institute will once again participate in the 2026 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion. This year’s Annual Meeting will be held in Denver, Colorado, from November 21 to 24, and will include the annual DANAM Conference on November 20-21.

 

Arihanta Institute will be showcasing research in Engaged Jain Studies across multiple units including the Religion and Food Unit, Contemplative Studies Unit, North American Hinduism Unit, the Yoga in Theory and Practice Unit, and at the DANAM Conference. Professor Christopher Jain Miller also continues his role as co-chair of the Yoga in Theory and Practice Unit alongside his colleague Alba Rodriguez Juan (UC Riverside).

 

What makes this year’s Meeting particularly special for Arihanta Institute is the fact that two of our graduate students, Diana Hulet and Agni Hogaboom, will be presenting for the first time.

 

Diana Hulet, a graduate student in the Engaged Jain Studies MA program at Claremont School of Theology, will be presenting her research on animal ethics in contemporary yoga communities on a panel titled “Contemplative Foodways in Vaiṣṇava, Jaina, and Yoga Traditions” that will be co-sponsored by the Contemplative Studies and Religion and Food Units.

 

Her paper is titled “From Śavāsana to the Slaughterhouse: Yoga, Animals, Food, and Ethical Tensions in Contemporary Contemplative Practice,” and showcases her work as a publicly engaged scholar who is involved in yoga practice, animal activism through photo journalism, and academic research. Most specifically, Hulet’s presentation will consider how yoga spaces engage with animal and environmental ethics, asking how contemplative concepts and practices inspire awareness of relationality with animals and ecosystems, as well as what yogis consider as “food” in contemplative practice.

 

Agni Hogaboom, another graduate student in the Engaged Jain Studies MA program at Claremont School of Theology, will be presenting their research on Jain ethics on a larger panel at DANAM (Dharma Association of North America). Hogaboom’s paper will discuss Jain ethics in light of contemporary environmental concerns, using the methods of Engaged Jain Studies to assess both Jain community voices advocating for environmental protection as well as to propose constructive ways that Jain ethics can be applied to some of our most pressing environmental challenges.

 

In addition to this forward-thinking graduate research, Professor Christopher Jain Miller will present his paper, “Contemplating Dairy: Jain vegetarian cognitive dissonance alleviation strategies in Jain foodways.” This paper extends his research published in early 2026 that considers anti-veganism within the global Jain community. Miller demonstrates the psychological strategies underpinning Jain anti-veganism that are revealed using analytical frameworks developed through his engagement with the fields of Human-Animal Relations and Critical Animal Studies.

 

Miller will also be presenting on a roundtable titled “Yoga, War and Necropolitics” co-sponsored by the Yoga in Theory and Practice and North American Hinduism Units. This roundtable builds on Achille Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics,” considering the various historical, colonial, and contemporary appropriations of yoga toward a “politics of death” (Mbembe 2019).

 

Miller’s contribution here builds on his research in Embodying Transnational Yoga (ETY, 2024) where, he argued, necropolitics (rather than biopolitics) provides a powerful framework for analyzing many forms of contemporary yoga in geographical regions subject to the destructive effects of uneven development and capitalism.  “When proceeding with such projects,” Miller writes in ETY, “the analytical framework of necropolitics opens new pathways for those conducting fieldwork in sites where uneven development, racism, classism, and other social ills of late industrial capitalism are rampant” (Miller 2024, 145).

 

Miller’s research drawing from Mbembe’s necropolitics comes out of a concern for the ways that communities in South Asia experience disproportionate levels of environmental pollution and, as a result, chronic health issues. Furthermore, his research regarding the consumption of dairy within the Jain community is grounded in a concern for the unimaginable suffering of mother cows and their children in the dairy industry. Hulet’s research shares similar concerns, asking why contemporary yoga practitioners would consider certain animals as “food” in light of their ethical commitments. And finally, Hogaboom, who lives a zero-waste lifestyle and operates a mutualist yoga space in their local community, will connect Jain ethics to issues of social and environmental justice.

 

Finally, Miller will also be organizing and presiding over a panel at the DANAM conference that will feature ethics in the Dharma traditions.

 

In these ways and more, all of the research that will be presented at the AAR’s Annual Meeting in 2026 and at DANAM is rooted in the fundamental Jain principles of compassion and nonviolence.

 

Please join us in this socially engaged research. We look forward to connecting you at in Denver!

 

References
Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necro-politics. Durham: Duke University Press.

Miller, Christopher Jain. 2024. Embodying Transnational Yoga: Eating, Singing, and Breathing in Transformation. London: Routledge.