Online Program Book

For many years now, campuses across North America have organized to fight for anti-caste protections. While fighting for anti-caste protections is important, it is only the first step that opens the door towards building caste competencies within North American academia, heavily entrenched in its anti-Black and white settler colonial foundations. Beyond the multicultural model, which seeks to incorporate caste as a measure of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the University of California Collective for Caste Abolition is invested in organizing for material and structural change within the UC system and beyond. In this roundtable, the UC Collective for Caste Abolition will share the history of its formation, and its current work and visions to illustrate how institutions across North America may heed the call and participate in the movement for caste abolition. might continue their activism toward caste abolition.

Mary Jo Iozzio's book Disability Ethics and Preferential Justice: A Catholic Perspective (Georgetown University Press 2023) is the mature work of a long-time scholar of theo-ethical reflection on disability. In it, Iozzio develops a theological lens for uncovering ableist assumptions and practices in both religious and secular contexts, while also drawing on Catholic social teaching to articulate strategies for deliberate action in the church and society at large. This panel serves to celebrate Iozzio's work and critically engage it from the perspectives of liberation theology, disability theology, and Catholic moral theology. Iozzio will be present to engage the other panelists and the audience in conversation.

This panel brings together a diverse group of scholars to discuss Atalia Omer’s Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Based on an extensive empirical study of inter and intra-religious peacebuilding practices in the postcolonial contexts of Kenya and the Philippines, Omer identifies two paradoxical findings: first, religious peacebuilding praxes are both empowering and depoliticizing, and second, more doing of religion does not necessarily denote deeper or more religious literacy. The book deploys decolonial and intersectional prisms to illuminate the entrenched colonial dynamics operative in religion and peace and development praxis in the global South. Still, the many stories of transformation and survival emerging from spaces of programmatic interreligious peacebuilding praxis, generate decolonial openings that speak back to decolonial theory. The panelists will reflect on how the book’s findings and theoretical interventions contribute to contemporary conversations in the study of religion, coloniality, and justice-oriented peacebuilding.

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.