Challenges and Futures

As the IAHR’s North American regional association, NAASR will be hosting a conversation at this year's in-person meeting about the state of academia in this region. While the phenomenon of broad-scale institutional challenges is not new (guest editor Gary Lease devoted a special issue of MTSR in 1995 to the “pathologies” characterizing the study of religion in North American universities), the specific infrastructural characteristics of these challenges deserve our attention. Especially since our theoretical commitments ask us to examine the structural workings of power, we are in the intellectual position to explore this moment in higher education not only in terms of its machinations and effects but also in terms of prospective responses and resistances to the same.

We are assembling a discussion with a roundtable format to facilitate analysis that is as forthright and productive as possible. How should we respond to the rapidly changing economic and institutional landscape of academia? How can we demonstrate to our students the importance of thinking critically so as to give them language and tools for their own navigations of the social worlds in which they find themselves? What exactly is our work as scholars of religion in relation to the profession right now? To be clear, and in keeping with NAASR’s priorities regarding method and theory, these questions and their answers should not reinforce a theory/praxis binary. On the contrary, we want to assemble a group of thinkers who can put our particular skills to work in proactively undermining that very binary and demonstrating how needful our scholarship is in this moment.