This panel explores gender and religion in a variety of contexts using diverse methods. The first paper relies on a global survey of Christian churches to explore women’s participation and gendered dynamics in church life, with comparisons across countries. The second paper uses a field experiment to explore whether an applicant’s acknowledgement of past sexual misconduct affects opportunities for pastoral employment in Protestant churches, with surprising findings. Using qualitative interviews, the third paper examines how religious involvement can be a potent resource for Black mothers embedded in a rural, predominantly Black community as they navigate a fragmented maternal health care system and reproductive trauma. The fourth paper employs ethnographic fieldwork in India, Canada, and the U.S. among Hindu Adhiparasakthi communities to investigate the role of women’s leadership in sustaining religious communities locally in a transnational context.
How do Christians understand the question, “What makes a good marriage?” How do evangelicals and Catholics alike frame this question and how do they answer it in our contemporary moment, when Christians are concerned that the institution of marriage is on life support? And, what does studying these questions reveal about how Christians navigate gender, sexuality, and intimacy as they practice their lived religion? Courtney Ann Irby’s insightful new book *Guiding God’s Marriage: Faith and Social Change in Premarital Counseling* (New York University Press, May 2024) answers these questions and more through rich qualitative analysis. This roundtable panel gathers sociologists of religion and historians of religion, gender, and sexuality to amplify its important contributions to the sociology of religion specifically and the study of religion more broadly.
The term “subaltern” signals a condition of subordination and marginalization in relation to an elite power structure; subalternity is contingent upon power disparities that manifest at both local and structural levels. The papers in this panel collectively examine the role of *bhakti* (devotion) in various subaltern contexts, where subordination occurs along the axes of caste, class, linguistic privilege, or gender. The panel elucidates the multifaceted nature of *bhakti* as it operates within marginalized communities across diverse socio-cultural milieus and historical periods. Presentations span from thirteenth-century Karnataka and fourteenth-century Maharashtra to nineteenth-century Kerala and contemporary Gujarat and Bengal. The panel primarily examines *bhakti* as a mode of participation wherein practitioners engage with and build relationships with gods. The panel addresses two broad questions: How does *bhakti* shape a practitioner’s navigation of subaltern marginalization, and conversely, how does subaltern marginalization reshape *bhakti* ?
Inspired by the seminal 1989 ethnography by Bruce McCoy Owens about an annual Nepalese festival which pays particular attention to the power unleashed by its “messiness,” this panel has scholars confront “the mess” they deal with in their current research and explore ways in which we can divert the field from its persistence on the ordering forces at work in concepts like caste, ritual, asceticism, cosmology, colonialism, knowledge systems, and institutional history, paradigmatic of a fixation on the containment of “mess” that holds the danger to be mimetic onto its object and to reproduce the stereotype of a intrinsically chaotic South Asia persistently called to order by itself and by others. This panel asks whether there is a way to stay with “the mess” (in the sense of “staying with the trouble”) in South Asian religion without either teleologically subordinating it to or purposefully excluding it from the production of order.
Stemming from conversations related to SherAli Tareen’s recent book, Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire , which brings together several conversations in South Asian Islam and South Asian religious studies more broadly, this panel considers the following questions: 1) How has new scholarship on Hindu-Muslim relations (Nair, Tareen) historicized and theorized the discursively porous yet sociologically stable categories of religious identification in early modern and colonial South Asia? 2) How do the concepts of sovereignty, translation, and friendship enable us to ask new questions about religious identity in colonial India? 3) What are the consequences of these answers for how we understand inter-religious strife in contemporary South Asia?
This panel brings together scholars of religion, anthropology, and law to analyze the spatial politics of contested sites of worship in South Asia. It examines how legal structures in colonial and postcolonial South Asia have served to shape the spatial politics of contested sites, and the interrelations between the multiple religious communities in the region. The papers delve into the dynamics between multiple groups of worshippers, navigating fluid spatial histories and analyzing ritual expressions of practice and solidarity. They investigate a range of previously-unexplored contested sites in South Asia, including the Baba Budan Shah Dargah in Karnataka, Mughal-era mosques legally confirmed as "temples," the Sufi Shrines in Sri Lanka, and, finally, the public spaces of Chennai associated with Muslim women’s ritual presence and solidarity. Together, they serve to connect the politics of particular religious spaces with the broader legal and cultural themes of making and unmaking of sacred spaces.
The genre categories of biography and hagiography have generally, albeit not always uncritically, been adopted in South Asian religious studies circles. Given the propensity of scholarship and religious traditions themselves to focus on the life stories of central individuals, this panel argues that a reconsideration of biography and hagiography is in order with a concern towards genre. Counter to the common after-the-fact use of genre terms, this panel focuses on the process of genre : of establishing narrative norms, of the competing interests of participating parties, and of the vagaries of literary and social history. We draw our examples from Hinduism, Islam, and Jainism in specific historic and linguistic contexts to reconsider these genres more broadly. All papers situate specific life stories in the production of authority within their respective communities, in the process of remembering past individuals, and in the construction of an individual to perpetuate "future memory" and authority.
The New Directions panel introduces new research in the study religion in South Asia by recently-graduated Ph.D. students and doctoral candidates. This year's papers examine wide ranging topics including Pakistani khwaja sara , Da’udi Bohras, medical missionary work, and Sanskrit philosophical texts. In doing so, panelists consider the intersections of religion with gender, caste, authority, and literary genre.
I propose an Author Meets Critics Roundtable Session for discussion on Rajbir Judge’s new book Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia published this year by Columbia University Press. Prophetic Maharaja asks the question of how do religious traditions and communities grapple with loss, particularly when it is of such magnitude that it defies the possibility of recovery or restoration? More specifically it asks this question in the context of examining the thought and career of Maharaja Duleep Singh (d. 1893), the last maharaja of the Sikh empire, and his struggle during the 1880s to reestablish Sikh rule, the lost Khalsa Raj, in Punjab. At its core Prophetic Maharaja argues for what Judge calls “dwelling in loss,” and for exploring the notions of sovereignty and history that such a practice of dwelling might make available.
This session explores the unequal and unjust power dynamics and violence inherent in American imperialism, nation building projects, and capital-driven forces. Papers analyze how such regimes produce chronic precarity and “sacrifice zones” through practices of surveillance and carceral governance, gentrification and displacement, and ecological extractivism. Presenters will introduce case studies of survival and meaning-making, shifting intimacies and solidarities, and challenges to secular spatial order. In doing so, they each address distinct racial and socio-economic forms of marginalization across a range of urban geographies.
Tibet has long conceived of itself as a frontier or a borderland of unruly human and non-human beings in need of taming, mostly by Buddhism. Now absent from most maps, and facing the erasure of even the name "Tibet," per PRC mandate, Tibet, its language, and culture are increasingly marginalized. This panel explores this space of the margin - and its dynamics of violence and non-violence – through five case studies spanning Tibet and the Himalayas. These include Bhutanese Buddhists who build stupas in Lhop territory to convert the Lhop and turn them away from animal sacrifice, monasteries built by Tibetan nomads to lay claim to contested territory in Qinghai, a newly built peace park for Nepal-China friendship adjacent to Boudha stupa in a Tamang and Tibetan enclave of Kathmandu, ‘invisible villages’ inhabited by non-human beings in Gyalthang in Yunnan, and the cultural politics of negotiating “sacred landscapes” in contemporary Sikkim.
This special session will explore the use of alternative modes of academic expression in the study and communication of religious, theological, and philosophical topics. Centered on the “video essay” format, the three-person panel will involve three short video presentations of scholarly work, followed by discussion on both the intellectual ideas and the efficacy of the video essay as a medium of academic expression.
In 2009 Oliver Crisp and Michael Rea introduced the term “analytic theology” to the contemporary literary scene through their edited volume *Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology.* Since then analytic theology has become the subject of multiple monograph series, degree programs, and academic workshops but, as Michelle Panchuk and Rea observe, it has also developed “a reputation for being inhospitable to careful and experientially informed exploration of the various philosophical-theological issues connected with culturally and theologically marginalized social identities.” Efforts have been made to change this reputation and expand the analytic theological enterprise, but to what extent have these efforts succeeded? In commemoration of *Analytic Theology*’s fifteenth anniversary, this roundtable features a critical discussion between leading contributors to the diversification of analytic theology on the topic its growth, change, and trajectories of inclusion.
Eastern Catholicism offers unique vistas and vantage points in regard to the landscape of Orthodox and Catholic Christianities. Their historic witness in arenas of civic turmoil and their abiding commitment to unity despite repeated misunderstanding and mistreatment by the Roman Catholic Church present a research field worth cultivating in its own right. *Eastern Catholic Theology in Action: Essays in Liturgy, Spirituality and Ecclesiology,* the inaugural volume in the new series "Eastern Catholic Studies," from Catholic University of America Press, aims to open up this conversation through attention to salient themes in theology, history, and canonical discipline. A pre-arranged panel featuring editors, contributors and respondents will introduce the volume and explore future pathways, including the prospect of a new unit in the Academy. The conversation will feature volume editor Andrew Summerson (University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto/Lumen Christi Institute, Chicago); series editor and contributor Yury P. Avvakumov (Notre Dame), contributor Khaled Anatolios (Notre Dame) along with Ashley Purpura (Purdue University) and Jaisy Joseph (Villanova University). Among themselves, the panelists represent a spectrum of Eastern Catholic traditions (Ukrainian, Ruthenian, Melkite and Syro-Malabar) as well as Greek Orthodoxy.
This panel will reflect on Plaskow’s intellectual contributions to religious feminism in the academy and her commitment and service to the AAR. The focus will be on how her work has both influenced generations of religious feminist scholars and been critical to bridging differences of religion, race, sexuality, gender, ability, and gender identity in our field.
2024 marks important anniversaries in Afro-American religious history, including Jessie Jackson’s historic first presidential campaign (40th, 1984), Freedom Summer and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and Malcolm X’s establishment of the Muslim Mosque, Inc. (60th, 1964). These moments reflect important examples of the varied expressions and interactions between Black religions and the political sphere through electioneering, organizing, and critique. The Afro-American Religious History Unit will host a special session that reflects on these various iterations at the institutional, individual, social, and communal levels. Of special concern will be both the expansive and limiting ways that intersections of Black religions and politics have been considered as opening spheres of influence, as generating political critique, and as sites of gendered power and struggle. Featuring an interdisciplinary set of leading, public-facing scholars, this roundtable will engage the historical and contemporary significances of the intersections of religion and politics for African Americans.
This panel focuses on the book review, as genre and form, arguing for its centrality within scholarship, insisting on its creative possibilities in terms of style and approach, and investigating ways to make review-writing more legible to department and university administrators who, too often, dismiss this labor as (merely) general “service” to the profession. This panel also commemorates Religious Studies Review, the only journal devoted entirely to publishing reviews in religious studies and theology, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. Panelists, a selection of current RSR editors as well as administrators from academic institutions, will discuss the function and necessity of reviews and reviewing. Attention will also be given to advice on review-writing for graduate students and junior scholars, and audience members will also have the opportunity to sign up to review books with RSR during this panel.
The place of Religious Studies programs, majors, and courses feels precarious: departments and programs are being cut, enrollments are down, and the question of how to maintain thriving programs is on many of our minds. The challenges of attracting and retaining students is ever-present. We propose a lightning-round-style roundtable to focus on practical and innovative strategies that departments have used to successfully increase and retain enrollments. Our colleagues are changing department names, changing program goals, redesigning courses, and renaming classes. This is an opportunity to discuss and share strategies that have and are working in response to these challenges.
The work of figuring out how to reimagine our place in the landscape of higher education is falling on us, as scholars and professors in Religious Studies. This proposal for Teaching Tactics/Teaching Gift Exchange centers solutions and strategies for maintaining vibrant Religious Studies programs.
The 2024 US election has the potential to fundamentally alter domestic and global politics, regardless of who wins. This session gathers an intersectionally and methodologically diverse set of scholars to analyze the key forces shaping the election and its consequences. (Each co-sponsoring unit designated one panelist for this session. Panelists will be divided among the session's several segments to allow for many voices to be in conversation.)
This is the annual in-person meeting of the AAR's Committee on the Status of LGBTIQ+ Persons in the Profession. While the meeting is generally closed, AAR members wishing to bring a concern to the committee's attention should contact committee chair Melissa Wilcox at melissa.wilcox@ucr.edu .
