Energy, Extraction, and Religion Seminar

In the fifth and final year of the Energy, Extraction, and Religion Seminar, we invite proposals on futures of (and beyond) extractivism. 

We envision one session as a summative and reflective conversation about the Energy, Extraction, and Religion Seminar. In particular, we invite proposals concentrated on futures beyond extractivism. In so doing, we will take the risk of posing the utopian (or heterotopian) question: what would it mean to think and live beyond extractivism? What would this look like in the study of religion? As Lauren Berlant emphasizes, “to see like a heterotopian is to attend to and elaborate a loose assemblage of emergent lifeworlds” (2020, 14). Where are such emergent lifeworlds materializing? How might they be cultivated? What role might religious practices, cosmologies, lifeways, ceremonies, or theologies play in cultivating such futures?

Our second session will also emphasize counter-extractivist futures, but with a focus on pedagogy, curricula, and higher education. We invite proposals describing the implications of a turn toward critical engagement with religion, energy and extraction in classrooms and university settings more broadly. How should the insights and theories from this seminar and this transdisciplinary array of fields be incorporated into religious studies and theology courses? How should a refusal of extractivism change our methods of teaching and mentoring? Reflecting beyond our role(s) as individual scholars, how does attention to the nexus of energy, extraction, and religion facilitate broader efforts to rethink and reimagine higher education?