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 “future/s,” we wish to amplify the invitation to examine and envision "other possible futures, past and present” as “our gatherings are powerful opportunities for collective re-imagining and action.”

Possible topics/areas of engagement as related to this topic may include:

Alternative Futures OUTside the Academy

→ What do futures that decenter academic institutions/the Academy look like? 

→ What possibilities emerge when futures are practiced as Imagination/Play/Rest/Wonder/Resistance?

→ What futures do we foreclose if we do not attend to the environment/earth?

→ What can we learn from ancestral wisdom traditions and how can they bridge chronological and dialogical divides for a future outside the Academy?

→ What futures might we imagine that make room for multiple ways of knowing and being, especially attending to embodied and sensory practices and postures?

Alternative Futures INside the Academy

→ How do we cultivate imaginative pedagogical praxis as a way of unlearning what we were taught and reframing our approaches to teaching and learning? 

→ How does the practicing of wisdom traditions prepare us for the future? How can this be seen as a mode of decolonizing the Academy?

→  What can we learn from ancestral wisdom traditions and how can they bridge chronological and dialogical divides for a future inside the Academy?

→ What practices of learning, scholarship, and living might be needed in an Academy whose future is precarious? What practices from past and present endangered communities might be brought forward as a means to decolonize the Academy?