This panel explores how creative practices and material objects serve as agents of expression, identity, and activism within Muslim communities globally. One paper focuses on ta’ziya production in Lucknow, India, highlighting the role of devotional objects in shaping Shi’i religious life and identity. Another paper discusses activism within the Claremont Main Road Mosque community in South Africa, challenging apartheid legacies and promoting solidarity with marginalized communities. A third examines the provision of religious educational services in Turkey, tailored specifically for conservative women, through fatwas provided by the Diyanet and its preachers. The final paper reevaluates the intellectual legacy of Muhammad ‘Abduh within modern Islamic reform movements, emphasizing his influences outside Salafism and his engagement with Sufism and practical philosophy. The panel aims to shed light on the multifaceted ways in which material culture, creative expression, and religious authority intersect to shape identities, activism, and reform within the global ummah.
2024 marks the twenty-year anniversary of the publication of Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject . Its five chapters have shaped conversations across anthropology, religious studies, political science, philosophy, and beyond. Through an ethnography of a women’s piety movement in Cairo, Mahmood offered an analysis of Islamist cultural politics, where “politics” has less to do with the state form than the embodied infrastructure of everyday ethical practices. In addition to its account of this under-studied aspect of the Islamic revival, Politics of Piety developed a rigorous theoretical critique of the secular-liberal assumptions that dominate/d academic and public discussions on religion and politics. This roundtable brings together six junior scholars in conversation, taking it as an occasion to revisit these chapters: not to offer an account of their reception or to contextualize their arguments but to reread them in view of our own disparate projects today.
This roundtable session discusses The Book of Clouds (Fons Vitae Press, 2024) by Oludamini Ogunnaike, one of the most recent works of the emerging trend of Islamic poetry in English. This work employs the classical ghazal and qasida forms and genres (praise, elegy, wine ode, ghazal) to do significant constructive theological and political work, taking on issues like the occupation of Palestine, white supremacy, the global refugee crisis, gun violence in US schools, women's repression in Iran, and more alongside Sufi explorations of the nature of the self, knowledge, language, love, and unity in a lyrical style dense with allusions to the Qur'an, the Islamic tradition, and classical Arabic, Persian, and English verse. Participants discuss the possibilities and potential drawbacks of doing intellectual and academic work in a poetic form as in this work.
In recent years, scholarship at the intersection of anthropology, textual studies, and historical studies has highlighted the dynamic role of Islamic textual traditions in (in)forming interpretive communities today. Building on these inroads, our panel seeks to theorize the ways in which communities form, relate to, and engage texts in practice. We take a capacious approach to the definition of a text and interpretive community, asking: How are interpretive communities formed? What is the relationship of a sacred text to its use in practice? How are historical texts reimagined, circulated, and transformed in contemporary contexts? This papers session considers the complexity of lived texts by analyzing how the diverse genres of poetry, hagiography, oration, and hadith are constituted and remade in practice, signifying expansive understandings of Muslim ethics, identity, sanctity, affective experience, and knowledge in Islamic modernities today.
This session examines women’s use of text, images, video, memes, and audio across various social media platforms and spanning four religious traditions in North America. By focusing on brujas on Instagram, Muslims on TikTok, evangelicals on Twitter, and Catholics on YouTube, the papers explore situated digital practices. How do women use media to contest dominant and hegemonic interpretations of religious texts and practices and put forth their own? How do they use humor, creativity, and referentiality to create digital content to assert authority and build community? What are some of the ways that the relationship between online and offline worlds are impacting religious experience? This papers’ session approaches these questions from a variety of perspectives to theorize some of the ways in which religious women’s use of diverse social network sites contribute to theorizing digital religion and digital archives and methods.
This panel demonstrates how research on women religious challenges our predominant narratives of Catholic clergy sexual abuse. The first paper, on “The Sexual Economies of Clericalism,” centers questions of agency, subjectivity, and submission for survivors of abuse by Catholic nuns and theorizes the gendered construction of sexual knowledge. The second paper, “Abuse in the Latin American Church,” reframes these questions by arguing that women religious are a distinctively vulnerable population for abuses perpetrated by male clergy – a problem that is particularly pronounced in countries like Bolivia, where the Church’s high social status has continued to silence victimized nuns. The third paper, “Everyday Spiritual Abuse,” draws attention to broader patterns of gender-based violence in Australian Catholicism, theorizing how everyday forms of gendered harm, including misogyny and breadcrumbing, create the foundation for systemic Catholic sexual violence.
This panel centers questions of theory and historicity, two vital but often underexamined areas in scholarship on clergy sexual abuse. The first paper, “’You Better Tell The Truth,’" examines the intersections of racial and sexual violence through a (re)reading of archival materials from Black Catholic Chicago, raising critical questions about the tension between the ethical imperatives of anti-racism, truth-telling, and historical accountability. The second paper, “Shedding Light On Silence and (in)Action,” brings oral histories of contemporary Belgian survivors into conversation with centuries-deep cultural concepts of ‘bystandership,’ thus working towards a theory that can explain why historical research on clergy abuses in Belgium remains severely limited. The third paper, “Breaking the Silence,” explores a critical lack of language around childhood sexuality, as evidenced by the narratives of 15 Catholic survivors interviewed through Fordham University’s recent Taking Responsibility grant, then suggests a more robust and inclusive vocabulary informed by trauma studies.
Dr. Jon Ivan Gill has put together a text engaging with a true nuanced area of Hip Hop, culture, and religion. Based on the categories of mainstream philosophy of religion, we must ask the question if said categories are adequate to describe the conceptual frameworks of traditions not philosophically dependent on Western theistic understandings, such as religious traditions and philosophies of life emerging from the continent of Africa and appearing in the United States, the Caribbean, North, Central, and South America, and Europe. This session will have respondents engage the work of Dr. Gill and his latest text.
“We came from Shaolin, but we’re bringing Hip-Hop culture around the world" (The RZA, Wu-Tang Clan). The papers in this session explore the potential intersecting points relating to Hip-Hop's cultural evolution and individual artistic journeys as seen in the work of The Wu-Tang Clan and B-Boy Gato. The engagement of “Supreme Mathematics” and the wide and varied use of cultural references by The Wu-Tang Clan, helps to form and create a narrative that resonates with Chan Buddhist teachings and hagiography. Similarly, B-Boy Gato's experience highlights the transformative power of breaking amidst violence and exile. Through their artistic expressions, both The Wu-Tang Clan and B-Boy Gato navigate societal challenges, constructing narratives of heroism and enlightenment. The papers in this session provide insights into the multifaceted expressions of Hip-Hop culture from pop culture references and religious engagement to the transformative potential of dance within marginalized communities.
This panel diagrams “to make a way out of no way” in terms of violence in “two acts.” Here, the two “acts” considered in the panel can be understood both in terms of (pre-)logical sequence and methodological intervention. If the gratuitous violence that defines Black social death’s longue durée constitutes the fundamental aporia of Black liberation, then this panel takes up Fanon’s imperative to lay hold of this violence as the pure means of making a way out. “Means” here is marked twice insofar as an adequate account of any Black radical means worthy of the name itself demands a renewed attention to method as the search for a way . Accordingly, this panel argues that when the World-forming historicity of anti-Black violence is properly understood in its transcendental register, then divine (or “daemonic”) violence appears as the pure mediality for simultaneously temporalizing and destituting its “total climate.”
This omnibus session invites discussion after each pair of papers. Paper one argues for a reading of “Force of Law” that positions it as both a continued engagement with Levinas’s conceptions of violence – in ways both affirming and critical – and as a corrective to some of Derrida’s own earlier thinking on violence. Paper two takes up Jacques Derrida’s worry that Walter Benjamin’s notion of divine violence too closely mirrors the forms of mythic violence that it is supposed to undo. Paper three asks: What is the relationship between modern finance, the violence of chattel slavery, and the formation of American religious identity? Focusing in on Iiyiyiu histories of land-based activism, paper four suggests that Indigenous appeals to religion that enunciate sustained resistance to the colonial project are acts of resignification and theories of religion in their own right born from a methodology of sustained relationships to place.
Michel Foucault labeled counter-spaces that influence, contest, mirror, and invert as heterotopias. Paper one considers heterotopia through transformations of a plot of land in Colorado, unveiling environmental challenges, adaptations, and the interplay of sacred spaces facing climate-related shifts. The second, co-authored paper offers a dialogic analysis of two U.S. social institutions – early nineteenth century prisons and mid twentieth century sexual closets – at a key moment in their historical formations. In the dialectic between imagined and materialized, they each produce another heterotopia – queer and spectral in form – in which other worlds are imagined, queering the hetero of heterotopia. The third, multi-authored paper showcases innovative ethnographic research of a revival of Victorian era-style spiritualism underway in British public houses (‘pubs’), the latest collective space for contemporary spirit communication. The fourth paper examines the ambiguous utopia/heterotopia that is the Métis community of Ste Madeleine in Manitoba, destroyed by the settler government.
This Roundtable reflects on the publication, A Cultural History of Hinduism, a six-volume study of Hinduism engaging 55 scholars from South Asian studies published this year by Bloomsbury Academic. The Roundtable brings together a group of volume editors and contributors from the publication and a critic who has not been involved with the project to discuss strategies and challenges in writing today about Hinduism and its histories in multireligious contexts past and present. The aim is to open new directions for considering the diversity of Hinduism and South Asian religious traditions and the complexity of religion as a category in relation to them. The discussion explores the multivocality emphasized in cultural history via topics such as the construction of classicality; empire’s facilitation of cultural interaction; the role of interpretation in religious ideology; practices that shape the global dissemination and consumption of Hinduism; and academic topics suggested by the audience.
This panel critically interrogates the “material turn” in religious studies by examining its major interventions in intellectual and cultural context. Over the last three decades, the “material turn” has effected significant transformations in how scholars theorize and discuss religious phenomena, countering the field’s historic emphasis on meaning with a focus on objects, practices, spaces, and embodiment. How has this revision been articulated and achieved? Why have religionists come to think about materiality in the terms that they do? And what alternatives may have been elided in the process? The panel’s contributors pursue these questions from three distinct, though related perspectives. We engage the material turn in sequence as a feminist project, a decolonial intervention, and a reaction to the “linguistic turn” before reflecting on the overarching context of neoliberalism. By doing so, we seek to provoke new understandings of the field’s recent history and alternative conceptions of materiality.
Eschewing theories of religion that configure religions as tightly integrated systems, this panel emphasizes practices of construction that do not create an epistemically bounded space but rather an open-ended assemblage of practices that find coherence in specific contexts using particular methods. This panel thus approaches the formation of religion(s) as a poly-vectoral coming-together of multiple dimensions of doing, using the medieval Daoist Supreme Purity (Shangqing) movement as an example. Such an approach moves beyond, or reads through, textual canons to uncover implicit actions and performative dimensions inherent in text. Taken together as a comparative conversation, the discussion members will open up a pout-pourri of methods and techniques by which the sect was formed, known, and asserted over time, the processes that made the religion what it was.
Since the inception of Daoist Studies, scholars have examined the ways in which established Daoist lineages have interacted with local societies and their beliefs and customs. Pioneering studies have posited that aspects of canonical and institutional Daoist traditions provide an organizational framework for the formation of local pantheons and practices. While this analytical model has benefited our understanding of the transmission of texts and teachings from the top down, from the imperial to the local, questions remain as to how local society has shaped and reshaped religious practices and identities from the bottom up. This panel examines precisely these inquiries across several specific localities in both historical and modern contexts. Its participants explore a diverse range of materials, including liturgical manuals, ordination documents, esoteric talismans, temple stelae, regional maps, and ritual performances, aiming to introduce new perspectives and methodologies for understanding local expressions and adaptations of Daoist practice.
Daoist sources contain abundant material for the study of Daoist verse, from the more well-known Supreme Purity (Shangqing ) scriptures to the profusion of Complete Perfection (Quanzhen ) verse to later poetry produced through spirit-writing. Moreover, literati writers, who observed and participated in Daoist rites, wrote poems on the ubiquitous presence of Daoist ritual, priests, practices, sites, and texts for centuries of Chinese history. This panel focuses on poetic expressions that were informed by Daoist contexts and turns our attention to the ways writers of verse engaged more specifically with Daoist cultivation practices. The papers address a range of materials from different time periods, but all seek to explore central questions: How do writers use poetic forms to capture, imagine, reflect or imagine various kinds of Daoist bodily cultivation? How do socio-historical conditions and conventions shape such poetry? How does such poetry function rhetorically?
Daoist studies is dominated by textual scholarship. This panel directs our attention towards rich yet oftentimes sidelined materials beyond texts. The first paper disproves a longstanding assumption regarding a seemingly anomalous figure in the Heavenly Court murals (Royal Ontario Museum). By contextualizing it within Yuan drama, the paper shows that the figure resembles a common representation of the Lord of the Eastern Flower-Palace. The second paper examines the development of the Ghost King’s depiction in Chinese liturgical art (14th to 19th c.) from the Qinglong, Baoning, and White Cloud monasteries, illuminating his transition from a delegate of hungry ghosts to an empowered mediator between heaven, humanity, and the netherworld. The last paper examines the collective memory surrounding Mount Tai, arguing that it has become a "realm of memory" for different entities, Daoist Priests, spirit mediums, and state officials alike, whose seemingly contradictory recollections represent various facets of its history.
This panel probes diverse aspects of non-human animal mortality. Participants examine models for mourning the extinction of species (Ryan Darr); the ways humans mourn the deaths of beloved pets (Chris Miller); and the preservation of non-human remains as sacred relics in museums (Natalia Schwien). Jamie L. Brummitt provides feedback, followed by audience Q&A. Join us for the business meeting immediately after the panel.
In this panel we explore the ways that different Jewish sources, from different times and places in Jewish history, demonstrate what it means to be in community with the dead. Our papers discuss stories from the Talmud Bavli, burial rituals in medieval Ashkenaz, and a painting cycle from 18th c. Prague to show that across these diverse times and places Jews were concerned with how to be in relationship with the dead, as well as their Jewish and non-Jewish neighbors. In the sources we present it becomes clear that the dead are not simply absent, but rather continue to have an emotional, ethical, religious, or even conscious presence. In these sources the dead are owed some kind of relationship with the living, whether it is with those who care for the body, visit the cemetery, or the larger Jewish and non-Jewish society who observe these various rites and rituals.
