Online Program Book


	Buddhist Pedagogy Seminar Theme: Examining nonviolence, exploring positionality, and engaging in contemplation in Buddhist Studies classrooms Beverley Foulks McGuire, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, Presiding This roundtable session brings together instructors from a variety of institutions to explore different examples of Buddhist pedagogy in practice. The presentations discuss Buddhist Studies courses that examine instances of Buddhist violence and nonviolence, that explore issues of identity and positionality influencing study abroad instruction, and the results of engaging contemplative practices within a graduate curriculum. The demographic makeup of their students and their institutional contexts differ: they include a private university operated by a Buddhist organization in Thailand, a Catholic research university, a private liberal arts college, and a Buddhist graduate school. Jeffrey Nicolaisen, Duke University Teaching Compassionate Listening in a Religious Conflict Course at a Buddhism-affiliated University in Taiwan Abstract Buddhists have been particularly successful in portraying the Buddhist Dharma as a nonviolent religion. As a result, some high profile scholars attempt to debunk the popular nonviolent image of Buddhism. While scholarship aiming to correct biases in the academic literature is important, in the classroom, scholarship that seeks to identify the violence tendencies of Buddhism, “New Religions,” cults, or other teachings also serves to invoke stereotypes of religion as violent, irrational, or superstitious. This paper presents the teaching methods of a class on Religious Conflict at a comprehensive private university operated by a Buddhist organization in Taiwan. The course curriculum both introduces the scholarship on religious violence in general, and Buddhist violence in particular, but also employs active learning pedagogy in the form of the Compassionate Listening Project curriculum to provide both examples of Buddhist nonviolence and opportunities for preemptive conflict resolution. Huili Stout, University of Dayton Peace and War with Thich Nhat Hanh Abstract The topic of peace and nonviolence lends itself easily to a presentation of basic Buddhist teachings. Thanks to the writings and witness of Thich Nhat Hanh, such a presentation can utilize a combination of stories, poetry, discussion, and theoretical exposition, yielding a rich classroom experience with the potential to transform students’ understanding. This paper presents the outline of a lesson with three segments, each of them escalating the level of challenge posed to the students. The first segment tells stories from Nhat Hanh’s own experience during the Indochina War and the Vietnam War. The second segment presents his reflection on the US military response to the September 11 attack of 2001. The final segment concludes with Nhat Hanh’s provocative poem, “Please Call Me by My True Names.” Alison Melnick Dyer, Bates College Student Identity, Positionality, and Privilege in the Buddhist Classroom Abroad Abstract How do student (and instructor) identity and positionality influence how we teach about Buddhism abroad? Likewise, what can this tell us about how we might make Buddhism courses taught in North America more accessible to students, especially at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs)? In this paper, I discuss the challenges and successes associated with recruiting and then guiding a group of historically under-resourced college students on a four-week Study Abroad intensive course in Ladakh, India. From initial recruitment to final project presentations, there are pedagogical, cultural, and religious aspects that must be considered (and reconsidered) when teaching Buddhism in a classroom of students who are BIPOC, come from low-income homes, and are the first in their families to attend college. While this paper focuses on the Study Abroad context – that is, experiential learning where students are invited to engage with the tradition _in situ_, and intensively over a short period of time – my experience working with this cohort abroad also has implications for how we approach teaching Buddhism in the North American classroom. Namdrol Miranda Adams, Maitripa College Still Gazing: The Evolution of Contemplative Pedagogy in Teaching Buddhism (A Follow Up to 2019's "Now I Can See the Moon") Abstract In 2019 this author demonstrated a model of Buddhist pedagogy that dovetailed with the mainstream academic movement contemplative pedagogy, offering promise in expanding American educational pedagogies with ideas of new epistemologies, dynamics, and languaging around why, how, and whom we educate. In 2019, this author proposed a young Buddhist graduate school, Maitripa College, as a nexus of investigation for such application, and the teaching of Buddhist Studies in its traditional and applied forms as a basis of understanding whether and how such pedagogy is effective. Four years later, this paper will summarize a critical analysis of this application thus far: through student evaluations of Maitripa College students, interviews with key college founders and friends from both inside and outside of traditional academia, and artifacts of student work, this paper will ask, and answer, the question: is contemplative pedagogy an effective medium through which to teach Buddhism in higher education?
	Buddhist Pedagogy Seminar Theme: Teaching with Buddhist Art and Material Culture Nicole Willock, Old Dominion University, Presiding This roundtable introduces the Rubin Museum’s recently launched Project Himalayan Art, a multi-disciplinary resource for teaching about Buddhism through art and material culture. Project Himalayan Art (PHA) is designed to help scholars and teachers make connections across diverse regional expressions of Buddhist culture, and to expand representation of Himalayan and Inner Asian religious cultures in the classroom. This roundtable will be structured as a dialogue, in which attendees can explore new multimedia resources for teaching Asian religions through object-centered approach, while also giving feedback on PHA materials. Session presenters are particularly interested in receiving input on PHA from the practical pedagogical standpoint, and welcome attending participants’ thoughts on using art and material culture in their teaching, including from faculty who have already experimented with using Project Himalayan Art resources (https://projecthimalayanart.rubinmuseum.org/). Panelists Annabella Pitkin, Lehigh University Elena Pakhoutova, Karl Debreczeny, Rubin Museum of Art Xiaotian Yin, Harvard University Responding Benjamin Bogin, Skidmore College
	Foucault and the Study of Religion Seminar Theme: Unacknowledged Subjects Niki Clements, Rice University, Presiding Michel Foucault’s work focuses on Christianity and the West, but his conception of the subject cannot be defined without the Others that mark its boundaries. This panel brings together work on the racialized and gendered subjects that remain unacknowledged within Foucault’s concept of Western Christian subjectivity, and work that applies Foucault’s analytic of power to subjects beyond his consideration. The papers examine his work in light of topics such as the anti-Blackness in his conceptions of religion and race, martyrdom accounts and their gendered representation of the Christian subject, and construction of socially and economically indebted bodies through religious rhetoric, and apply Foucauldian frameworks to the colonial inflection of confession among Indigenous Mexican Christians, and early Dalit Buddhist resistance to Brahmanical power structures. Exploring Foucault’s continuing importance for examining raced, gendered and religious subjectivities across centuries and continents, this conversation reflects on Foucault’s framework through the figures marginalized within it. Marlon Millner, Northwestern University Tending to the Wounding or Life After Death: Black Critical Thought and Foucault’s Use of Religion/Race Abstract Subjecting Michel Foucault’s schematization and theorization of biopolitics to Black critical thought is tending to the wounding that makes biopolitics possible and might also be the site of its refusal. Tending to the wounding is the site of the emergence of something called race and religion, the productivity of what Foucault calls biopower. At the same time, the site of life is marked by both Orlando Patterson’s ‘social death,’ and Hortense Spillers’s ‘flesh.’ Tending to the wounding of the emergence of biopolitics by way of Black critical figures such as Patterson and Spillers, allows for reconceiving of Foucault’s utility for the study of religion with acute attention to is constitutive antiblackness. The goal is to forestall the all-too-easy application of Foucault’s biopolitics as diagnostic and analytic on religion and to foreground the Black flesh, so as to adumbrate a mode of Black study which offers otherwise possibility to Foucault. Mateusz Ozimek, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland The Genealogy of the Confessing Subject. Confessional practices among the indigenous people of Chiapas, México. Abstract The purpose of this paper is to describe the author’s anthropological research inspired by Foucault’s genealogy of confession. Foucault argues that confession, developed by Christianity, became one of the West's most highly valued techniques for producing truth. Following this statement, the author decided to investigate the practices of confession among the culture of The Tzotzlil - indigenous Maya people of the central highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. The author has conducted ethnographic interviews with both Christian and traditional Maya families. The aim of the investigation was to verify how people with the same ethnic core but professing different religions perceive the role of confession in their lives. The results seem to confirm Foucault’s point of view. People who profess traditional Mayan religion do not have any rituals similar to individual confession but as soon as they convert to Christianity, confession starts to play an important role in their lives. Nicholas Witkowski, Nanyang Technological University Thinking with Foucault about Outcaste Buddhism Asceticisms as a Challenge to Panoptic/Carceral Brahmanisms Abstract In his essay, “Pedagogy and Pederasty,” Leo Bersani suggested that Foucault’s oeuvre could be split into two distinct conceptions of power. The first was a conception of panoptic power most clearly articulated in Foucault’s poststructuralist masterpiece, _Birth of the Prison_. On this model, the individual body has no freedom—the body is an instrument of the governmental structure which exercises absolute domination. The second was the conception of power found in Foucault’s histories of asceticism. Bersani was extraordinarily critical of these volumes on ancient asceticism, accusing Foucault of abandoning the theoretical rigor of _Birth of the Prison_ and instead buying into the fantasy that one might be made more free through the ascetic process of intensification of one’s relationship to one’s desires. In this paper, I will explore how Foucault’s two seemingly irreconcilable models (explaining how the self negotiates power) help us to articulate a history of “untouchable” Buddhist asceticism. Deivit Montealegre, University of Toronto The Indebted Body as an Economic Aggression: The Religious Violence of Economic Debt in Current Racial Capitalism. Abstract This paper examines the impact of economic debt within racial capitalism, using the murder of Alexa Negrón Luciano in Puerto Rico as a case study to explore the intersections of identity, religion, and economic violence. It argues that debt functions as a form of economic violence, particularly against marginalized communities, employing theoretical insights from Michel Foucault and Paul B. Preciado. The study highlights debt as a Foucauldian technology of body production intertwined with colonialism and heteronormative structures, transforming individuals into “indebted subjects” and “debtbodies” within a racial capitalist system. This analysis seeks to expose the violent and religious dimensions of economic debt, challenging traditional views and fostering a critical reevaluation of its societal impacts and ethical implications in the interplay between economy, race, religion, and identity.

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