Women of Color Scholarship, Teaching, and Activism Unit

The Women of Color Scholarship, Teaching, and Activism unit (WOCSTA) welcomes submissions of individual presentations, organized panels, and roundtable discussions that are in keeping with the unit’s purpose: this unit fosters intellectual exchange in the fields of religious studies and theology as they are developing in diverse communities of color from a gendered analysis. 

While the AAR features Program Units from diverse communities of color, we provide a space for conversation between communities of color. Understanding identity as performative and shifting, we make the very category of “women of color” itself a site for political and intellectual engagement. We encourage non-traditional formats that foster conversation, engagement, and meaning-making among panelists and session attendees. 

In keeping with the presidential theme of freedom, we wish to amplify the invitation to examine and envision "freedom in its widest sense: across traditions and religions, practices and policies, art and ecology, and poetry and performance." 

Possible topics/areas of engagement may include:

Practicing Initiative

What are practices of liberated embodiment, especially for women, women-identifying, and non-binary identifying persons, in their respective religious context or in religious-impacted social and political settings?

Religion and Revolutionary Movements

What modalities of freedom might emerge if the wisdoms of religious and revolutionary initiatives are honored, foregrounded, and implemented - together?

• Dialogical examples include conversations between Christianity and Black Liberationist movements, African Traditional Religions and Pan Africanism, Islam and Neo-colonial movements, etc.

Parsing Freedom(s)

We invite examinations of what is lost or conflated about freedoms given political tension and upheaval in local, national, and international contexts.

Possibilities for engagement include but are not limited to: 

• Conversations between "intersectionality" (as utilized across various marginalized communities) and "double jeopardy" (as originated in African American women's experiential life, especially the definition coined by Frances M. Beal)
• The nuances of marginalized reproductive rights given cultural, social, and political contexts
• Explorations of underexplored and under-examined areas of freedom and liberation for women, women-identifying, and non-binary persons

Co-existent Endeavors for Freedom

What can conversation and collaboration between freedom-facing movements look like? Examples include but are not limited to: 

• Jewish and Islamic feminisms
• The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Combahee River Collective
• Womanist theologies and minoritized feminist theologies

Pedagogy and Particularity

How can one's pedagogy connect them to community in this current time?

• What does collaboration look like in these contexts, especially with pushback against social justice? 
• What does strategy look like? 
• What does solidarity look like? 

Resistance and Reckoning

What are religious and spiritual resources for resistance? What are spiritual and religious practices that inhabit and/or inspire resistance?

• What are the tangible aims and goals of resistance?
• What might subversive resistance emphasize?
• What does creative and imaginative resistance look like?

Concerning co-sponsored opportunities, WOCSTA is excited to be one of the co-sponsoring units with the African Diaspora Religions unit and their respective proposal for a roundtable discussion, "Kitchen Table Conversations" described below:

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.

Potential Co-sponsors: Religion and Food Unit, Religion and Memory Unit, Religion, Affect, and Emotion Unit, Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Unit, Women of Color Scholarship, Teaching, and Activism Unit, Queer Studies in Religion, and Religions, Medicines, and Healing Unit

WOCSTA is also delighted to join with the Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Unit as a co-sponsor on the "The Women Who Made Malcolm X Possible" session described below:

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.