Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Unit

The Womanist Approaches to Religion & Society Unit welcomes papers that highlight one or more of the following topics:

Remembering Coretta Scott King (Invited Panel)

While Coretta Scott King is recognized as the architect of the King legacy and founder of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, few realized the integral placement of her justice worldview and social activism to influence the public role of Martin Luther King, Jr, and the Civil Rights Movement. Historical and sociocultural aesthetics informed a classically trained musicologist, Scott King’s justice lens. Essentially, Scott King was already championing social change through peaceful protest and introduced MLK to Gandhi’s philosophical praxis of satyagraha. As a proponent for the Center, Scott King traveled extensively to speak on nonviolence, anti-war and peace justice activist for religious freedom, racial and economic justice, LGBTQIA dignity, and gender justice. 

The Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Unit focuses on Scott King as a justice coalition builder, organizational leader, and spiritually grounded orator in her own right. 

In collaboration with the African Diaspora Religions Unit, the Womanist Approaches Unit invites papers that address one of the following themes:

Kitchen Table Conversations

“My sensorial childhood breakfast table memories merged aromas of coffee brewing, bacon frying and burning hair from overheated hot combs” – Scott Alves Barton

Foodways and faith traditions travel as liminal archives within every individual or group in migration, immigration, or as refugees. In today’s hyper-ultra-processed world, we continually need to reflexively ask, Who do we need to be thankful for that sourced, cooks and placed this food on our table; preserving our culinary cultural traditions, whether sacred or profane, in feasting or in famine? 

In 1990, master photographer MacArthur Genius Carrie Mae Weems created her iconic social documentary “Kitchen Table Series imagining and documenting the battle around the family  between women and men, friends and lovers, parents and children.” In addition to potential skirmishes, the kitchen table is foundational as a locus of commensality, particular ways of knowing, and intergenerational “enskilled” teaching and learning, historically via women’s work and knowledge. Our foodways tell stories of how we are who we are, where we came from, and what we hold dear. Lauding sacred rites of communion, sacrifice, and succor. Kitchen tables have also been sites of adolescent homework, quilting and needlework, memorialization of events, putting food by, flirting, bandaging cuts, beauty practices, joking and games playing, gossiping in cafeterias, storytelling, sharing grace and prayer. Kitchen Table stories/storytelling evolve with each telling and respective audiences, just as Lumbee traditions used story work to relate the tribe’s history, present, and futurity. These tables are centers for healing and mourning, planning strategies for change, refusal of negative paradigms, starting a radical feminist press, or inciting revolution…Quoting poet Joy Harjo, “The world begins at a kitchen table, perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing, crying, eating the last sweet bite…”

We welcome folks to submit materials for this roundtable discussion.

The Women Who Made Malcolm X Possible 

2025 is the 100th anniversary of Malcolm X/el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, revolutionary, civil/human rights activist, and Muslim minister (May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965). Centering his work on the work Black women do to usher in freedom and resurrecting from history the love and teachings of his mother, wife, children, and other women who made him possible, we have chosen to honor Malcolm by honoring the Black women of his world.

 Writing on the beautiful intersections between Malcolm, Martin, and James Baldwin and their mothers, “The Three Mothers,” author, Anna Malaika Tubbs asks, ‘How was Malcolm influenced by Louise Little’s roots from the rebellious Carib island nation of Grenada?" She, who spoke several languages, her ‘home-training’ lessons in recitations of the alphabet in French, and admonitions to her children to study, and correct misinformation given by their white teachers?’

C. S’thembile West’s new book, Nation Women Negotiating Islam: Moving Beyond Boundaries in the Twentieth Century (2023), redeems the role of women, mothers, sisters, and daughters in the Nation of Islam (NOI). It sits at the intersection of African studies, Religious and Islamic Studies, providing the necessary counternarrative to past transgressive discourses. West recognizes and underscores the agency of NOI women in their negotiation of gender norms, sexual propriety, leadership models, education, and family building as a Black national project. Given our current political climate, this book can work as a tool for modeling equity and respectful scholarship on women’s roles as organizers, leaders, and change agents dedicated to uplifting and rehabilitating their communities as stewards of West’s arguments of  a “politics of protection.”

We invite paper proposals in conversation with this theme and C. S’thembile West’s book. 

 Womanist Approaches to FREEDOM

According to the incoming President’s remarks, the AAR units are invited to explore the imaginary of freedom in its widest sense: “across traditions and religions, practices and policies, art and ecology, and poetry and performance… “Who decides who or what is free; for how long? Where is freedom preserved, where is it lost?”. . . “Can there be freedom without justice? Does, or should, freedom equal material and emotional well-being? How does one reconcile competing senses of freedom?” 

The Womanist Approaches Unit also invites contributors to articulate visions for justice pathways to a viable horizon of freedom for all. Proposals are welcomed that raise dilemmas for surviving and thriving in a country or societal environments that embrace a mythology of freedom and democracy while enacting legalized modes of subjugation and disparity. What do such intersectional analyses reveal about the impact of existential freedoms on privileged or marginalized groups, and how do they break through hegemonic assumptions? Proposals can include papers, panels, literary, and artistic approaches to elucidate a critical lens.        

Open Call for Papers

Womanist Approaches welcomes compelling papers that utilize womanist methodologies and engage womanist topics beyond the themes presented above.