Alternative Academic Expression Beyond the Tradition Conference Paper: Video Essays

The idea for this panel is motivated by frustration with the (sometimes) alienating nature of tradition academic conference presentations, which often consist of pre-written texts read in a monotone voice with little concern to the affective and aesthetic quality of the ideas being presented. Furthermore, based on multiple conversations with younger scholars and teachers over the last few years, there seems a growing sense that the current state of religious studies (both its scholarly output as well as pedagogy) is in desperate need of new modes of expression and communication correlating to changing social, political, technological, and aesthetic realities. While the standard academic paper presentation, when done well, is still a relevant and effective mode of academic communication, it represents an older academic world not yet dominated by images and digital technology, and one where traditional text-centered publications are still the primary delivery mechanism for academic ideas. It also represents an academic world that has not fully grappled with the changing nature of intellectual attention and communication in the age of digital distraction, expanding knowledge of neuro-divergence, the need for a wider range of learning and collaborative environments, and the ubiquity of video and other digital media in academic and non-academic settings alike.

The video essay format, which incorporates images, texts, music, and other artistic and aesthetic forms, provides a promising medium for academics to address a new digital world now fully come of age. Utilizing syntheses of images, text, music, sound, and narrative, we will explore the video essay’s potential as a form of academic expression, both in terms of pedagogy and as a medium for scholarly discourse. The following video essays (each approximately 20 minutes in length) will be presented and discussed:

“Thought in Reality” -(Name Redacted)

"Thought in Reality" is an experimental video essay exploring the philosophical question, "where does thinking take place?" Juxtaposing footage of an academic job talk with a collage of photography, video, colorscapes, and other visual objects, the film ponders the epistemological, scientific, aesthetic, religious and theological conditions of thinking and creativity within the environment of the contemporary university. This is a highly abstracted aesthetic exercise in image, text, poetry, and music. The video footage has been run through layers and layers of manipulation and juxtaposition, representing an attempt to turn the stifling aesthetics of a modern university classroom into something more strange and interesting, or something along the lines of what Jacques Rancier calls “dialectical montage,” which involves “organizing a clash, presenting the strangeness of the familiar, in order to reveal a different order of measurement that is only uncovered by the violence of a conflict.”

"Without God, Within the Sky" (Name Redacted)

This video-essay is an attempt to think Dietriech Bonhoeffer’s late “religionless” ethics together with anthropologist Tim Ingold’s “weather-world” ontology. Beginning with Bonhoeffer’s claim that, in modernity, we must live “without God” as a stop-gap and relocate God instead "in the midst of life," the video proposes Ingold's "weather-world" as the source and site of a religionless ethics. The weather-world itself is the source of our being together as creatures that calls forth our “being there for others.” What the video form allows me to do that a traditional academic paper does not is to show an actual region of the weather-world as well as glimpses of actually existing human beings who inhabit it. The combination of video, music, and spoken text displaces the centrality of conceptual mastery in the response it invites from the audience. It centers instead an affective response to the exigency of being "in the midst of life."

"Actually, its more of a comment" by (Name Redacted)

The knowledge we produce as scholars is an extension of the environments we inhabit, the norms we adopt, the disciplines we impose on ourselves, the ways we perform, and the community structures we reproduce through our participation. As this work is always bodies, spaces, terminologies, institutions, and habits. These structures become templates for communal identities - religious, scholarly, political, and so on. Such “embodied affective templates,” Donovan Schaefer writes, function “not only as a set of private experiences but [also] as an engine that penetrates systems of power and produces widespread, subdiscursive effects within those matrices.” Additionally, Rita Felski has explored how affective orientations and moods are integral to modes of knowledge production. Critically for this work, Felski has demonstrated how the normative status of specific simultaneously a work of feeling, ways of organizing feelings in the pursuit of knowledge that remain operative even when occluded by binaries that split thinking from feeling. Through the lens of affect theory, we can examine how scholarship is shaped by the "semistable" affective structures stretched across scholarly methodologies involve forms of affective discipline, moods and orientations underwrites assumptions about the nature of, and capacity for, academic "freedom." Alongside other constraints, structures of feeling reproduce the kind of scholarship we do, and shape us into the kinds of scholars we are required to be. The work of learned communities, at least partly, is to continually reconsider the norms, structures, and methodological rules we must adopt in order to produce reliable, testable knowledge.

Academic conferences are, paradoxically, sites where such norms are reestablished through standardized performances, and where they can be questioned, challenged, and perhaps even flouted. What structures of feeling does the stereotypical conference presentation reinforce? Which feeling structures and performative styles are actually necessary for producing reliable knowledge? And what would happen if we expanded our performative repertoires, and welcomed a broader range of feelings as co-participants in our collective work? What can all this tell us about scholarship's persuasive power (or lack thereof) in the digital ecosystem beyond the Academy, where it must compete with pseudo-science, conspiracism, and the content-creator gig economy?

The proposed dramatic video presentation will use humor to raise these questions (and any others that might emerge!) among the session's audience, with the hope of provoking radical, pragmatic experimentation with alternative forms of scholarly knowledge production. In line with its experimental aims, this presentation will not attempt to share a work of ongoing scholarship; instead, it aims to playfully activate the conference session as a space where collective scholarship is done, not simply shared. To succeed in these aims, this presentation will require space in the session schedule for audience participation and discussion.