This panel brings together interdisciplinary scholarship that foregrounds lived, embodied, and community-generated knowledges to challenge dominant paradigms in religion, gender, and social justice. Across diverse sites—church abuse survivor communities in Australia, Hindu women’s menstrual practices in South Asia, Sikh diasporic devotional music, and feminist reimaginings of family in Korean literature—the papers examine how gendered experiences are shaped by religious, cultural, and colonial power structures. Collectively, the panel highlights collaborative, ethnographic, and decolonial methodologies that democratize knowledge production and recognize embodied memory, practice, and narrative as critical epistemic resources. Attention to women’s agency, survivorship, and creative world-making reveals alternative frameworks of justice, sovereignty, and relationality that resist institutional silencing and textual authority. By centering feminist, Indigenous, and diasporic perspectives, the panel offers comparative insights into how religious and cultural traditions can be reinterpreted to address harm, affirm agency, and imagine more just and inclusive futures.
This paper reports on a community-based research project in a large diocese in NSW Australia where researchers have been collaborating with survivor support groups to understand the impacts of harm that child sexual abuse in Catholic and Anglican churches caused.
One focus of this work is examining the way in which harm against children is gendered. Another focus is the collaborative methodology that the project utilised. This paper will bring these two elements together and explore the methodological approach and its efficacy in determining and meeting the ongoing challenge of addressing childhood institutional trauma and its impacts on women survivors.
The key principles of the collaborative research model are based on the importance of the provision of support services, the call to justice from Church leaders and the building of knowledge. The project collectively functioned to democratize knowledge production and recognise lived expertise as an important form of hermeneutical justice.
This presentation argues that international intervention programs often overlook locally produced knowledge about menstruation and diminish the importance of women’s practices, agency, value systems, relationships, and of specific religious forms and participation. I examine dominant global approaches to menstrual health in the Global South through ethnographic research with approximately 75 Hindu women in India and a comparative sample of about 40 Hindu women in Bajura, Nepal (2024–2025). By adopting a critical approach towards literature, methods and theories from within a religious studies lens, and foregrounding ethnographic evidence, the study highlights parallel forms of agencies within religious menstrual practices.
Renowned writer of the 1990s Korea, Gong Jiyoung is also famously known for her feminist novels. Go Alone Like a Rhino’s Horn published in 1993 is acknowledged as a novel that popularized feminism, making it a social phenomenon beyond a movement of progressive activists and intellectuals. Then in 1997, Gong wrote Good Woman to provide a fuller vision of a feminist future, in which a couple of women form a family like community in opposition to the heteronormative patriarchal family. The progressiveness of this vision was not fully acknowledged at the time, but recently Gong’s feminist novels have been reevaluated in a positive light, reading them as informative in queering Korean families. This paper takes this discussion further to explore the underlining Confucian understanding of selfhood in Gong’s vision, and how her literary imagination can contribute to the ongoing discussions on reinterpreting Confucianism to be more just and inclusive.
Music is central to Sikh devotional practice. The Sikh scripture itself is a musico-poetic text organized by raga melody and revered as the “Living Guru,” recited, performed, and sung during worship as a practice of communal remembering, spiritual gnosis, and divine union. The Sikh devotional music tradition (gurbani sangeet parampara) is part of an Indigenous knowledge system whose textuality is grounded in embodied memory and performative praxis. Drawing from over two decades of ethnographic research and participation, this paper examines the postcolonial revival and modern reform of Sikh devotional music, which became near-extinct during India’s colonization and partition. It engages narratives of musicians who have remembered and safeguarded Sikh musical knowledge while examining how colonial modernity privileged written textual authority and sidelined embodied sonic theologies. Using a decolonial approach and Sikh diasporic feminist frameworks, the paper explores how sound, embodiment, and memory challenge colonial paradigms of knowledge and authority and open possibilities for relational engagement, mutual respect, and shared sovereignties.