Feminist Theory and Religious Reflection Unit
For a roundtable on the challenges of reinvention, merger, and closure that target religious studies departments today, we invite proposals for short papers (7 minutes) on experiences, tactics, and tools for navigating our changing higher education landscape. We are especially interested in presentations that highlight marginalized perspectives, students, and/or scholarship.Please email Annie Blazer (alblazer@wm.edu) if you would like to be considered as a panelist.
For a possible co-sponsorship with Law, Religion and Culture, in response to the presidential theme of “Freedom,” we are interested in exploring the limits on freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion on college campuses. We welcome papers and panel proposals addressing protests, encampments, and other forms of resistance; police actions and surveillance on campus; legislative intervention in curricula and legislative oversight of syllabi and course design; as well as responses to such restrictions by students, professors, and administrators. Relatedly, the meaning of “DEI,” its current role in the political imaginary, and corporate and campus reimaginings of diversity initiatives in our immediate political moment are also topics of interest.
We are also planning an author-meets-respondents session, co-sponsored with Religions in the Latina/o Americas, on Sanctuary Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert by Barbara Sostaita focusing on the themes of borders, fugitivity, migration, sacred space, sanctuary practices, and lived religion. Please email Wendy Mallette (wendy.mallette@ou.edu) if you would like to be considered as a respondent.
This Unit has consistently provided programmatic space for a wide variety of feminist theories, including feminist theology, queer theory, continental feminist theory, feminist political theory, etc., as these intersect with a broad understanding of “religious reflection”, including institutional religious settings, or intersections of religion and culture, religion and aesthetics, religion and the body, and religion and nature. FTRR will continue to invigorate feminist analyses of religious discourse within a global setting. Urgent concerns include forms of religious violence and climate crises, among others.