The Costs of Preserving Religious Studies

Lee Edelman writes that “For politics, however radical the means by which specific constituencies attempt to produce a more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative, insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child." This session takes Edelman’s point seriously for religious studies, where the graduate student is quite literally the figure in whom the discipline invests its futurity. Each panelist - themselves PhD candidates trained on the field's critical apparatus - offers a brief provocation from within Edelman's frame, examining how the logic of disciplinary reproduction shapes what the field can imagine for itself: what counts as legitimate scholarship, what gets preserved and at what cost, and why alternatives that might require genuine transformation remain foreclosed in favor of transmitting the field as it already is. Their provocations then become the basis for a larger open conversation that asks not what religious studies owes its future but what its commitment to having one - in a specific, recognizable form - forecloses.