Online Program Book

TBA

Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South is a social movement ethnography of the New Orleans-based Black feminist collective Women With A Vision (WWAV) focusing on their rebirth after an arson attack destroyed their headquarters in 2012. Laura McTighe and WWAV's Deon Haywood weave together stories from their founders’ pioneering work during the Black HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s and their groundbreaking organizing to end criminalization in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina with other movements for liberation around the globe. They share WWAV’s own world-building knowledges as well as their methods for living these Black feminist futures now. This roundtable will emulate a "front porch talk" and showcase responses that address the themes of social organizing, Black feminist liberation, collaborative scholarship, ethnography, the context of the American South, and other facets relating to Fire Dreams.

“Single Mothering as Critique and Vision,” is a roundtable session on single mothering as an ethical, theological, philosophical, and historical act from which to challenge contemporary systems and theories of social reproduction and to imagine alternatives. We ask what it means to single mother under white supremacist heteropatriarchy and capitalist ableism. Single mothering serves as a binary breaker against the hierarchies constructed under contemporary systems of social reproduction: mother/whore, straight/queer, independent/dependent, mature/immature, able/disabled, and productive/unproductive. Hence, rather than the single mother representing lack, we offer theological, theoretical, and religious visions of single mothering as a force for more just approaches to social reproduction. Scholars have long pointed out the gendered, raced, and classed dynamics of care labor, and offered alternative visions of family. However, lacunae exist in terms of single mothering as a theological, theoretical, and political frame. This roundtable addresses this absence.

As do humans, Buddhist agents, materials, traditions and practices migrate. Between ethnic groups, crossing borders and travel overseas. This round table engages in a critical investigation of theory and research methods in the study of the migration of Buddhism in relation to contemporary Chinese societies. By coming together and sharing different approaches the panelists in this roundtable will reflect on the richness and complexity of this broad topic. In this session, Buddhism is treated broadly and inclusively, and looking at Chinese societies in their multiplicity.
Unpacking the different facets of this nexus, our session aims to share hands-on methodological tools and relevant theoretical considerations that scholars are facing when doing research in the nexus of migration and Buddhism. The session will therefore focus on research practices, challenges in collecting data, positionality, data and theory triangulation, and other particular demands related to research on communities, institutions, and agents of Buddhism in Chinese areas and overseas Chinese communities. A second aim of this roundtable is to critically question normative definitions of migration and the manner this concept is pertinent in describing the modern migration of Buddhism in Chinese societies.

In times of apocalyptic despair, notions of grief (for worlds or possibilities lost), modalities of violence (structural and discrete, epistemological and concrete), and prospects for change (whether revolutionary or kinds of therapeutic resignation) have emerged as central focal points for how popular visual culture represents, thinks through and responds to political, environmental, moral, and spiritual catastrophe. While conceptualizations and archives of grief, violence, and change have long histories in established domains within visual art, television engages with these in increasingly novel ways, deploying well-worn televisual techniques, ranging from melodrama to procedural to comedy to parody. In this transdisciplinary roundtable, we are interested in the typologies and modalities of violence that stretch across disparate portrayals within television series and popular culture. By foregrounding a sort of continuum of violence, from the discrete (particular acts) to the structural (systemic violence), this roundtable aims explicitly to think about how notions of loss, revolutionary change, epistemological uncertainty, and therapeutic coping each respond to a broader archive of violence. Especially, we are interested in the increasingly bimodal and bidirectional way in which representations of violence are themselves sites of violence and sites of violence are themselves already somehow representational or theatrical in nature.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act provided a historic breakthrough for the enshrinement of racial equality under the law in the United States on several levels. By some measures, it represents the legislative highpoint of the midcentury Black freedom movement, particularly the nonviolent wing of the international campaign’s activists. Those activists, predominantly Christians, often relied on their faith to persuade their fellow Americans to support the bill at local, state, and national levels. Fascinatingly, the reality that these activists had to persuade so many of their fellow Christians to support the Civil Rights Act reveals the many Christianities actively being practiced in the United States after World War II. Figures who used their moral authority and appeals to their Christian faith to fight for and against racial equality appealed to their religious identities and logics. Christianity has never been a monolith. Neither has the 1964 Civil Rights Act.