Online Program Book

The papers on this panel each contend with popular sites that order historical memory, value and affect. Authors address the melodies that accompany Walt Disney's dubious empire, the figures of haunted children in horror films, and the policing of Salem, Massachusetts. Together, these authors start a conversation about the religious valences of rembering, mis-rembering and scripting narratives.

This session delves into the complex intersections of gender, violence, and nonviolence within the sphere of religious and political conflicts across various cultural contexts. Exploring case studies from Nigeria, Myanmar, Africa broadly, and Java, the session explores how women and women-identifying people confront and navigate the challenges posed by religious extremism, military regimes, cultural norms, and historical narratives. It examines the roles that gender plays in both experiencing and resisting violence, highlighting efforts ranging from public discourse participation and the creative protest movements to philosophical reflections on relational autonomy and revisionist mythmaking. Through nuanced understandings of how women's agency and resilience in the face of violence are intricately tied to their religious and cultural environments, the session offers innovative perspectives on fostering peace, justice, and gender equity.

Bodies can be envisioned in a multitude of ways that simultaneously help and hinder the religious imagination and experience: the flesh of a fat body reimagined as absently thin in the afterlife, the digital and simultaneously enfleshed body in the Zoom box, the malleable yet rigid embodiment of transness. This panel brings together five papers to think through the interconnection between bodies considered to be “other” and the associations of both violence and beauty that attend othered bodies. Based in theories of the body, this panel strives to envision bodies within religious spaces and identities that work through both positive and negative processes of enfleshment.  

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century poor colonial conditions led Muslims to theorize their own decline and subsequently, antidotes to this perceived decline, including notions of pan-Islamic solidarity and the invocation of an imagined Muslim world, a world beyond the borders and dictates of nation-states. Islamic revival movements flourished in this period, as Muslims used Islam to articulate resistance to systems of domination, from British colonial rule in India, to Jim Crow in the United States. Together these papers present a complex portrait of Islamic twentieth century revival movements, which were both intensely local in their stakes and articulation, but also connected to larger global networks and trends. The twentieth century was a time of vast diversity in Islamic theological expression. At the same time as these distinct movements proliferated, appeals to an imagined, unified Muslim world and an idealized, all-encompassing Muslim identity increased.

This panel on “Karma and Sociopolitical Theory” brings together diverse methodological and theoretical approaches to explore the resonances or tensions between Buddhist concepts and human societies. The four papers are united by an interest in fostering conversation across areas and traditions about the implications of doctrinal theory on everyday life, and vice versa, the potential for social and political practices to illuminate Buddhist thought. They address evidence from royal ceremonial in contemporary Ladakh, philosophical theories of action, early modern Tibetan religio-political discourse, and contemporary Vietnamese Buddhist society. Together, these papers call attention to key questions that overlap philosophical, historical, and anthropological approaches to Buddhism, including the individual and social dimensions of karma, the relationship of human society to the larger cosmos, the intersection of cosmological or philosophical discourses with everyday articulations of karma, and the general relevance of this Buddhist concept as both object and source of theory.

The papers in this panel highlight the constructive value of the social sciences to illuminate theological and moral analysis in and of contexts marked by violence and structural inequality. Authors explore a variety of social scientific theories and a diverse set of contexts. These include how religion’s imbrication with schema development can help explain the existence of radically conflicting visions for the common good; how psychological accounts of global and local traits can inform theological reflection on the relationship between implicit racial bias and virtue formation; and how sociological work on collective trauma can further our thinking on the role of theology and religious doctrine in traumatization.