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Theme: Envisioning Career Futures: A Workshop for PhDs and graduate students
Saturday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
This workshop is for graduate students who are interested in exploring career possibilities outside of the faculty path in higher education. Borrowing from Bill Burnett and Dave Evan’s design approach to careers, we will reframe our doctoral training and experiences from the perspective of the “squiggly career” (Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper), using a values inventory and case studies of humanities PhDs who work outside of academia. This workshop is also an opportunity for participants to begin building networks and community online, particularly through LinkedIn. Some pre-work will be required of participants.
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Theme: Dialogue with ChatGPT and Bard: What are They Teaching About Religion?
Saturday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
As people begin to engage sophisticated chatbots, religious queries surely come up. What are ChatGPT and Bard teaching about religion and religions? What are people asking them, and how do they contribute to public understanding? Join in a live conversation with the chatbots, guided by interlocutors, so we may together explore the implications of AI as participants in our multifaith world.
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Theme: The Labor of our Hands
Saturday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
The three papers in this panel discuss the presidential theme for 2023 AAR, La Labor de Nuestras Mano (The work of our hands). The first paper on a handsewn prayer book from 20th-century Hungary explores questions of devotion, agency, and subjectivity through a single object: suggesting the study of devotion needs not to be a study of the devoted and arguing that through conscious, intentional practice, a space comes into being where the devotee encounters the divine and in so doing displaces the self. The second paper on the Palkaran Textiles community and their narratives in contemporary Tamil Nadu, India, examines how the Palkaran community embraces the theology of their textiles, utilizing the language and labor to divinize their art practice, as a response to growing violence garment laborers experience in South Asia. Finally, the third paper explores the metalworks of blacksmiths and sculptors who re-purpose weapons by transforming objects of destruction into objects with creative purpose, generating possibilities within the intransigent reality of interlocking systems that produce and distribute guns, and illustrating metalwork to provide a context for critical reflection on the dangers of normalizing the constraint and romanticizing the moral agent.
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Theme: Religion, Health Policies, and Beyond
Saturday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
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Theme: Digital Space and Globally Networked Buddhist Communities
Saturday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Until recently, most scholarship on Buddhism in North America privileged the study of institutionalized Buddhist organizations. For example, few attempts have been made to study the lived experiences of North American Asian Buddhists and their lived religious practices in digital environments. Scholars have highlighted the idea of “global Buddhism” in the past decade, arguing that Buddhism in the West must be viewed as part of a worldwide transformational process. With the exponential development of digital technology, a global Buddhism approach has expanded and now encompasses the digital world, along with many issues such as digital Buddhist community and identity formation, digital rituals, digital Buddhist education, and the authenticity of digital Buddhist practices. Was the digital Buddhist community just a short-lived necessity, or is this the general direction of the future of Buddhist communities in North America? What does it mean to be globally networked Buddhist communities in a digital world?
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Theme: Rethinking with the Abhidharma Literature: Rhetoric, Metaphysics, and Ethics
Saturday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
This panel aims to explore new approaches to the study of the Abhidharma literature by placing it in the larger context of Buddhist intellectual history. A pitfall in the study of the Abhidharma tradition is the assumption of a progressive linear model based on the chronological order of thinkers and texts. What we can observe, however, is that the Abhidharma literature itself is intertextually complex and semantically multivocal. Moreover, themes in the Abhidharma literature are continually studied, revisited, debated, and adopted by later Buddhist thinkers, regardless of sectarian affiliation. Rather than being the early phase of Buddhist scholasticism in the singular, it is more appropriate to think of it as a heteroglossia, a source of inspiration, and eternal imagined opponents for perennial questions for Buddhist thought. In this panel, three papers discuss the continuing influence of the Abhidharma literature on rhetoric, metaphysics, and ethics.
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Theme: Theology at Work: Three Professions and Catholic Thought
Saturday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
How might Catholic theology inform or transform ostensibly secular professions? This session explores this and related questions with an eye on three distinct arenas of work: higher education, industrial farming, and social work.
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Theme: Kevin Hector, Christianity as a Way of Life: A Systematic Theology (2023)
Saturday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
A discussion of Kevin Hector's Christianity as a Way of Life: A Systematic Theology (Yale University Press, 2023)
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Theme: Religious Studies Research: Haunted by the Specter of Violence?
Saturday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
In response to this year's Presidential theme, CARV seeks to foment a generative dialogue about how the "work of our hands" as religion scholars is descended from, complicit with, or otherwise appropriated to amplify any form of violence. The scholars featured on this panel, as well as the group discussion to follow, will engage with difficult questions about the historical legacies of violence; the fear of violence; active campaigns of violence; and/or the desire to use scholarship as a vehicle to either incite or resist violent actors. This panel’s ultimate purpose is thus to develop a discussion that assists religion scholars in reckoning with the ways in which their work knowingly or unknowingly contributes to discursive iterations of myriad species of violence. This session works intentionally from the margins to disrupt traditional systems of authority and ways of learning, knowing, and being in the world.
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Theme: Memorializing Massacres
Saturday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
As the use of the events at the Alamo in Texan self-understanding demonstrates, the memorialization of massacres can be socially useful but also controversial and problematic. This roundtable will examine ways in which massacres have been memorialized in several contexts, among them the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago, Romania’s participation in the Holocaust, the memorialization of the slaughter of Imam Husayn and his family in Taʿziyih performances in Iran, and the Indian government’s memorialization of the massacre of Shri Govind Guru’s followers by British troops on Mangadh Hill. How have the communities concerned employed both traditional and contemporary technologies to memorialize such events? How have these memorializations changed over time? What are the significant material, social, psychological, economic, political, cultural, and religious dimensions of such memorializations? To what uses have they been put, and how effective have they been? We look forward to a lively discussion.
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Theme: Institutional Possibilities and Limits for Constructive Muslim Thought
Saturday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
In its third year, the “Constructive Muslim Thought and Engaged Scholarship” seminar continues to work towards better understanding and defining the nature of this developing and distinctive field. For this session, the participants have been invited to join a roundtable conversation aimed at exploring the institutional contexts and challenges that each face in pursuit their respective scholarship. Drawing upon their own experiences, each panelist has been invited to discuss the role, influence, and impact that different institutional settings play with respect to constructive Muslim thought and engaged scholarship. What does it mean to undertake this work at a seminary, a public university, a private college, a religiously-affiliated school, or within a predominantly secular institutional climate? What issues, concerns, or dilemmas can or have arisen and how might scholars navigate or challenge them? All seminar attendees are encouraged to join the conversation after the invited participants have shared their opening remarks.
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Theme: Muslim Economies, Charities, and Capitalism
Saturday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
This roundtable on Muslim economies and charities examines Muslim engagements with capitalism in the United States and South Asia. The first panelist examines critiques of late capitalism in global Muslim revivalist discourses in the mid-twentieth century. The second panelist explores the strategic choice of American Muslims to formalize charity into non-profits in the post-Cold War period and analyzes racialization and citizenship as factors that contributed to the uneven participation in this project. The third panelist looks at zakat projects in the contemporary US and India to illustrate how zakat marks out new domains of care, solidarity, and justice-seeking. The fourth panelist explores the “racial” in racial capitalism by extending the analytic to frame Muslim engagements with capitalism in postcolonial contexts, with a special focus on Pakistan’s Islamic banking industry. The final panelist discusses possibilities for anti-racist economies with a special emphasis on organizing to invest in local communities.
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Theme: Tillichian Cartographies and Hip-Hop Aesthetics
Saturday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
The Tillich: Issues in Theology, Religion, and Culture and the Critical Approaches to Hip-Hop and Religion and the Tillich: Issues in Theology, Religion, and Culture Unit seeks paper proposals for a cosponsored panel on the contemporary cultural and artistic scene's disclosure of intersections between Paul Tillich and religious sensibilities expressed within Hip-hop. The music of Kendrick Lamar would be a case in point. We invite papers exploring new cartographies in Tillichian thought that center a scholarly use of Hip-hop as a cultural resource for thinking and rethinking through Tillichian theological and methodological approaches in the study of religion. We are especially interested in papers that address the following issues: Hip-hop, culture, and correlation; theology of culture and embodiment; theology and aesthetics; complex subjectivity, estrangement, and the “New Being”; Christian existentialism and the Black radical tradition; racial narcissism and Black existentialism.
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Theme: Neidan Masters and the Educated Public: Engaging Moral Philosophy, Literati Culture, Medicine and Shifting Gender Roles
Saturday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
“Neidan 內丹” (internal alchemy) refers to meditation methods that draw upon the metaphysics and metaphor-laden terminology of laboratory alchemy. Neidan methods were developed and propagated primarily (but not exclusively) by Daoists from the Song period (960-1279) onward, though it remains unresolved as to how much earlier we ought to trace the origins of Neidan.
Neidan did not develop within a Daoist bubble. Daoist Neidan theorists and practitioners included both clergy (monastic and non-monastic) and laity who were intellectually curious and deeply engaged in the ideas and interests of the larger educated public. This paper session features four presentations that highlight this engagement and demonstrate how it impacted the development of Neidan. Among issues explored are how Neidan proponents engaged and incorporated Confucian moral philosophy and medical knowledge, accommodated their teachings to a growing female clientele, and how they were perceived and received by the literati.
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Theme: Queer Studies, LGBTQI+ Lives, and Orthodox Christianity
Saturday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Orthodox-majority contexts, communities, and leaders often cause terrible harm to LGBTQ+ persons through homophobic violence, discourse, and policy. Sexual diversity is perhaps the most polarizing issue facing the modern Orthodox world—from the ecclesial discourse surrounding Pride parades and the conflict in Ukraine, to the Orthodox Church in America’s statement against discussing sexuality—and its real-life effects cannot be understated. Yet, international initiatives over the past decade as well as recent publications (Orthodox Tradition and Human Sexuality (Fordham, 2022) and Gender Essentialism and Orthodoxy: Beyond Male and Female (Fordham, 2023)) have argued Orthodox tradition has resources within it to address issues of gender and sexuality with greater openness and theological consistency. This session features three papers that engage traditional patristic sources to explore what a queering of Orthodoxy and an Orthodox engagement with Queer Studies might look like.
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Theme: Making and Studying Sacred Space as Ecclesial Practice
Saturday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Central to the work of many religious communities is the creation of sacred space. From majestic stained-glass covered medieval Cathedrals to intimate living room ofrendas adorned with the images and the favorite foods of loved ones, the spaces that Christians construct to serve as sites of ecclesial practice are powerful symbols that embody the unique identities and values of those communities. So much so that the work of making spaces sacred can itself be considered a constitutive ecclesial practice. These papers employ qualitative research as a resource for reflection on the theological significance of the work that church communities do to build, cultivate, transform, and/or designate spaces as sites of sacred encounter. This panel focuses on a diversity of qualitative approaches to the study of ecclesial space, including autoethnography, visual ethnography, and interviews, and highlights the importance of such methods for ecclesial practices of making space.
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Theme: Matter’s Imaginaries: Commemorating the work of Charles Long on Religion, Matter, and Energy
Saturday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
2023 marks the 50th anniversary of Charles Long’s tenure as president of the AAR. Long offered significant contributions to the study of religion broadly, but more specifically framed the emergence of the concept of “religion” in the wake of racial-extractivism. The modern construct of “religion”, therefore, assumes specific imaginaries of matter. Participants in this session have critically reflected on imaginaries of matter/energy and will offer reflections on the importance of Long’s work for the current study of religion. Panelists will also reflect specifically on the question of what the critical study of religion offers to existing discourses on energy and extraction humanities. Panelists will include: Jay Kameron Carter, Clayton Crockett, Mario Orospe, and Terra Schwerin Rowe. Opening interdisciplinary provocations will be offered by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson with concluding remarks on the ongoing reliance of Long’s work by Richard Callahan.
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Theme: Workshop: Using Social Media for Public Scholarship of Religion
Saturday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Public scholarship programs not only reimagine doctoral education in ways that facilitate purposeful social contribution, the production of new and creative forms of scholarship and dissertations, but also support graduate students' broader career perspectives.
Social media platforms are one of the most accessible and easiest ways to contribute to public scholarship and have significant potential, not only for public scholarship but also recruitment, publicity, and networking for academics. Creating and maintaining a social media presence is now something very essential for graduate students.
This workshop will teach graduate students how they can use social media for public scholarship of religion and share strategies on how to navigate and post on social media platforms to build a social media presence and contribute to discussions on topics related to your expertise as well as connect with other academics.
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Theme: Secular "Saints"
Saturday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Secular "Saints":
Saints are often recognized by dynamics of veneration, emulation, and mediation of power. But the same dynamics can be seen in contemporary, secular society with the relationship between celebrity and fandom. Are celebrity and sanctity broadly analogous? This session asks how we might use the hagiological categories and approaches to better understand the phenomenon of “secular saints” and how this eventually informs the comparative study of the rhetoric of “sainthood.”
Some questions to consider:
- How do celebrities, politicians, scientists, athletes, and activists embody holiness by another name?
- How do secular “saints” mediate power to their devotees and to what end?
- What (if any) is the analytical purchase of mapping celebrities as saints and celebrity as sanctity?
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Theme: Recasting Hindu Religious Spaces in Diaspora
Saturday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
By exploring ways Hindus in contemporary diasporic contexts continue to recast public, domestic, and digital spaces in the twenty-first century, this session proposes fames of anlaysis that reinforce the need toe extend scholarly discourse surrounding Hindu diasporic space beyond dyadic conceptions of “homeland” and “new or host lands.” Processes of recasting Hindu diasporic space, these papers demonstrate, engage broader issues of Hindu identity, the role of innovation in diasporic ritual performance, the nature of trans-generational networks both within and beyond ethnically bounded communities, and the agency of both human and divine actors. Perhaps most significantly, the session’s emphasis on digital diasporas, inter and intra-ethnic Hindu diasporas, and intersections of public and domestic Hindu space suggest a variety of new trajectories that the study of Hindu diasporas might fruitfully engage.
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