Online Program Book

This session focuses on tangible teaching methods, assignments, classroom activities, curriculum design that foster a feminist pedagogical approach to the Islamic Studies classroom. The presenters will share a specific pedagogical tool and discuss its application in the classroom, rather than presenting about feminist pedagogy in Islamic studies. The presentations will be followed by group discussions, emphasizing hands-on approaches, activities, and assignments that engage students in critical thinking and reflection contribute to creating an inclusive and empowering learning environment.

This joint session with the “Men, Masculinities, and Religions” unit of the AAR explores themes related to masculinity in Kierkegaard’s writings, including how depictions of masculinity vary among his pseudonyms and the authorial voices in his signed works, as well as the understanding of masculinity implied by his authorship as a whole. The papers consider the ways that Kierkegaard’s constructions of masculinity and spirituality may inform, critique, expand, or reinforce conceptions of masculinity in contemporary culture.

This panel theorizes the production of Jewishness alongside gender, sexuality, and the state. The first paper traces the co-constitution of the homosexual and the Jew in pedagogical materials circulated by Christian clinical pastoral educators from 1928-1941. Pedagogical documents demonstrate a convergence of medicalized and pastoral surveillance in disciplining race, sex, and religion. The second paper maps the terrain of queer Jewish place and space-making in U.S. anti-Zionist movements. It argues that the vibrant queerness of Jewish place-making beyond Zionism attests to the power of spatial disorientation across the layers of social, political, and ecological notions of “home” that are essential to re-imagining our relationships to “place.” The final paper considers cisness and Zionism as ideologically linked, as biopolitical projects of the state directed at controlling the affective flows of gender and Judaism. This focus sheds light on the violence of enforcing strict borders and the inevitability of resistance and refusal.

Kant and Nineteenth-Century Theology

2024 marks the 300th anniversary of Immanuel Kant's birth. To commemorate this anniversary, the Nineteenth Century Theology Unit holds a panel exploring Immanuel Kant's legacy and influence on modern theology. Kant’s critique of rationalist metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics and his quest for a new foundation of "science" (Wissenschaft) had a major impact on theologians in the late 18th and especially in the long 19th century. The panel presents research on nineteenth-century academic theology, exploring the intersection between Kant's work and post-Kantian idealism and the theologies it influenced. While one paper examines Immanuel Kant's theological commitments, others explore his influence on the theologies of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Isaak Dorner, Albrecht Ritschl, and Wilhelm Herrmann.

From the early days of the Pentecostal movement, women played a significant role in establishing the faith as well as spreading the gospel.  But in many ways, the movement could be patriarchal, and women have had to make choices in how they conducted their lives.  This panel looks at the way women have navigated and continue to navigate these complexities in various regions around the world and at times when they have often been marginalized along racial and ethnic lines as well. It also examines the ways that families have been shaped by their involvement in Pentecostalism.

In this roundtable, panelists will constructively, critically, and creatively engage Hanna Reichel’s After Method: Queer Grace, Conceptual Design, and the Possibility of Theology (Westminster John Knox Press, 2023). In After Method, Reichel rejects, on theological grounds, the possibility of doing theology right—of theology adequately justifying itself. Putting constructive theology (via Marcella Althaus-Reid), in conversation with systematic theology (via Karl Barth), Reichel argues that theological method, nevertheless, has use, and considers how we might do theology better. Reichel proposes an understanding of theological work as conceptual design, and offers an approach to theology as one of cruising outside the gates.

This papers session investigates the complexities of digital/simulated fieldwork and the interplay that emerges between individuals, groups, and system mechanics. Through ethnography we learn of emigrant Iranian computer scientists in the United States specializing in the “debiasing” of AI systems; Chinese Buddhist diaspora communities based in French Canada experiencing digital migration since the outset of COVID-19; U.S. researchers and educators utilizing virtual reality headsets for open-ended interviews and pedagogy; recruitment of virtual/automated followers in cult-building tabletop and video game play; and various Satanic conspiracy theorist communities united through social media. This session (which includes a respondent) provides profound phenomenological implications to our techno-virtual-being-in-the world, at times resisting the orderliness of algorithms and numbers with care and concern reserved for residual emotional states, finding authenticity in digitality, all the while further complicating the methodology of observing simulating worlds and actions as ethnography.