African Diaspora Religions Unit

1) Troublings: AI for 21 Century Religious and Spiritual Life in the African Diaspora 

How should spiritual and religious traditions with legacies of cloaked and publicly blind practices and rituals of the night encounter AI? What is captured and/or released, lost and/or emptied, laid bare and/or destroyed when rituals of the night and rituals of secret and silence become visually knowable beyond sacralized consecrated spaces? African Diaspora religions (ADR) practitioners and their communities have begun engaging AI, augmenting and/or transforming their practices through its use. These practitioners are themselves transforming AI. On the frontier of the making of new worlds, practitioners are harnessing the power of AI to connect, stay connected, and fulfill required rituals. Across the globe ADR practitioners are engaged in uncharted spiritual realms near and far. They are at once captivated and captured by the future of AI in religious/spiritual potential. Contemplating questions such as, but not limited to: In what way is AI being used and/or called on to intervene in, entangle with, and/or lead spiritual and religious encounters? How are notions of AI reshaping and is being reshaped by the religious imagination of ADR practitioners? With attention to and agitating tensions between and among concepts of Artificial Intelligence (AI), ('Artificial' Intelligence (AI), Ruha Benjamin's Ancestral Intelligence and Augmented Intelligence, this session invites papers from scholars, artists, practitioners from across the African Diaspora (and from across diverse understandings and negotiations of AI) to explore, examine, redefine, and/or interrogate present and future crafting and application of AI in ADR religious and spiritual life. 

2) Black Ecologies—Degradation of Black Environments

Whether AI in health care (Benjamin, R. 2024, Nelson, A. 2016), education (Tanksley, T. 2024), and /or daily life, the data has been consistent, from its earliest encounter with Black Life, AI has mirrored and deepened historical and ongoing systems of oppression (Nelson, A. 2016, Eglash, R and Bennett, AG 2026), exacerbating inequities through the targeted pillaging and displacement of Black people globally. Scholars, scientists and activists, among others, have been calling attention to, calling out, and/or disrupting (through intentional and improvisational re/mapping and re/training of AI) the normalized and new normalizing scripts of oppression. With Nathan Hare’s concept of Black Ecology (1970), which points to the burden put on Black people and Black communities to service the growth and comfort of Whites), Ruha Benjamin’s concept of Abundant Imagination (AI), identified as collective imagination for the collective good of society, and Tiera Tankley’s critical race algorithmic literacies, designed to encourage Black people to dream up abolitionist technologies, and imagine and design emancipatory lives, this session invites papers from scholars, artists, and activists engaged in imagining Black futures. 

Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha Mahina. Electric Santería : Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion. Columbia University Press, 2015. EBSCOhost.

Benjamin, Ruha. Imagination: A Manifesto / Ruha Benjamin. First edition. W.W. Norton & Company, 2024. EBSCOhost.

Eglash, Ron and Audrey G. Bennett. “African Interlace as Dynamic Grids: New Heritage Algorithms for Diaspora Design Ecologies.” Design and Culture. DOI: 10.1080/17547075.2025.2591967.

Hare, Nathan. “Black Ecology.” Black Scholar: (April 1970): Vol. 1, No. 6, Black Cities: Colonies or City States?: 2-8.

Nelson, Alondra, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After The Genome. Beacon Press, 2016.

Tanksley Tiera C. "“We’re changing the system with this one”: Black students using critical race algorithmic literacies to subvert and survive AI-mediated racism in school." English Teaching: Practice & Critique (2024): Vol. 23 No. 1: 36–56.

3) Carework: Re/Claiming Our Future/s

AI has entered the African Diaspora Religions space. Known for embodied cosmologies and epistemologies in which knowledge, communication, and communion are deeply mapped into and evoke from the body -  where feet, hand, head, back, and chest placement and hip, shoulders, and buttock movements speak to, about, and from divinities, and touch and sound elevate encounters, some African Diaspora Religions (ADR) practitioners have begun augmenting and/or transforming their practices through the use of AI as spiritual medium. Simultaneously, these practitioners are themselves transforming AI. At once captivated and captured by the future of the religious and spiritual life, on the frontier of new worlds, these practitioners are harnessing AI in powerful ways outside AI to stay in intimate connection with adherents across the globe - crossing uncharted territories of spiritual/religious realms near and far. Pastoral care is being re/articulated, knowledge redefined and recentered, and disembodiment repositioned. Calling on Aisha Beliseo De Jesus’s 2015 book, “Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion,” and her concept of ‘copresence’ as a touchstone, this session invites papers that explore, examine, and/or interrogate shifting concepts of Power, agency, embodiment, context, circulation/distribution, stasis (“continual balancing of multiple forces in equilibrium, a temporal modality of diasporic motion held in suspension, hovering between stillness and movement” (Tina M. Campt, 2017)  and futurity (“a future state or condition; a future event, possibility, or prospect”).

Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha Mahina. Electric Santería : Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion. Columbia University Press, 2015. EBSCOhost.

Moulton, Alex A., and Inge Salo. “Black Geographies and Black Ecologies as Insurgent Ecocriticism.” Environment and Society 13 (January 2022): 156–74. EBSCOhost.

Campt, Tina M. Striking Poses in a Tense Grammar: Stasis and the Frequency of Black Refusal. Duke University Press, 2017.