In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

In 1856, Chinese Americans successfully lobbied against the Foreign Miners’ License Tax, a discriminatory law aimed at driving out Chinese miners. The Chinese argued that they were free and cheap labor relative to enslaved Black people, casting themselves alongside free White men. Essential to their political success was the support of Presbyterian missionary William Speer, a liberal advocate for Chinese inclusion into California’s labor market from 1852 to 1857. Drawing from primarily Speer’s writings, political work, and correspondence with Walter Lowrie, organizer of Presbyterian foreign missions, and future secretary of state William H. Seward, I introduce "inclusionary Protestantism," an abolitionist and transnational movement for opening borders and incorporating Chinese immigrants based on their economic and moral value. Inclusionary Protestantism produced images of Asia that dovetailed with Lincoln’s emancipatory “Civil War faith" to form what Andrew Preston calls the ideological core of postwar American foreign policy in the twentieth century. 

This paper explores how Nikkei (Japanese immigrants and their descendants) Christians’ incarceration experiences challenged U.S. national myths about religious freedom within the transnational power dynamics during World War II. Duncan Ryūken Williams’ American Sutra persuasively contends that the U.S. incarceration policy sought to assimilate Nikkei internees into white American society through Christianization, thereby undermining the religious freedom of Nikkei Buddhists. Building on this discussion, this paper shifts to the infringement on Nikkei Christians’ freedom of worship and their resistance, examining Japanese documents of Nikkei Christian internees and English documents about the U.S. incarceration religious policy. In response to the Japanese empire’s criticism of the U.S. racism, white American Protestants, alongside the U.S. empire, sought to integrate Nikkei into white American society, thereby urging Nikkei Christians to cease their Japanese vernacular worship and join white American churches. However, Nikkei Christians safeguarded their spiritual liberty by maintaining their ethno-racial identity and churches.

This paper argues for a reconceptualization of freedom by drawing from my ethnographic field research on a transnational social movement network in the Korean diaspora in the U.S. that originated from the 1980 South Korean pro-democracy movement. The story of this intergenerational movement network, which has built solidarity with other communities of color, demonstrates the limits of narrowly defined freedom as individual liberty and disrupts the hegemony that restricts Asian American social belongings based on meritocracy. By analyzing their stories, I provide an expansive conceptualization of freedom in the context of marginalized people—as the capacity for imagining the collective self as the protagonist for freedom-building and transformative social change and building communal capacity to pursue them. These memories of our ancestors’ collective moral agency restore ethical dignity and radical hope in the process of freedom-building. This freedom enables us to pursue democracy by re-membering the marginalized as a center. 

The generational divide over Donald Trump has been well-documented in Vietnamese American communities, with the first generation highly supportive of Trump, while the younger generation tends to lean more liberal. To outside observers, that a generation of refugees would support a white nationalist, anti-immigration administration might seem both inconceivable and counterintuitive. But to those familiar with Vietnamese American politics, support for Donald Trump fits within a larger conservative culture among Vietnamese American communities. Scholars and activists attribute this to a number of reasons, but primary among them is anti-communist sentiment and conservative religious values. In this paper, however, I argue that all of these factors must be understood within the larger context of intergenerational trauma and the collective impact this has on group identity. Furthermore, I suggest that the generational divide of Vietnamese American communities might be read as a transmission of both intergenerational trauma and evidence of this trauma being repaired.

Residents of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, sometimes recount a familiar postcolonial experience of being “independent but not free”. Within this context, a group of Baptist Christians in the city are engaged in their own debates about the nature of freedom as a spiritual and ethical reality. Their religious account challenges a reigning liberal and Eurocentric view of freedom in some scholarship and public discourse, which presumes that freedom is the capacity to choose between alternatives.  

Drawing on 15 months of fieldwork with a network of middle-class Baptist Christians, I show how Zimbabwean Baptists develop alternative visions of freedom through the urgency of their daily moral deliberations as religious practitioners. Adhering to a normative, relational freedom, their accounts enliven critiques of freedom as individual choice. By invoking both Augustinian theology and an ethic of ubuntu, their religious visions of freedom shed critical light on current discourses about the nature of postcolonial freedoms. 

This paper examines how young Muslim women in Delhi create ethical responses to Hindu majoritarian politics through Islamic healing sessions, challenging liberal anthropological understanding of freedom. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnography, I analyze how participants of these sessions cultivate religious and affective practices that both acknowledge their marginalization and challenge its exclusionary logic. Extending Mbembe's "entangled temporalities," I introduce "affective temporality" to theorize how women create alternative experiences of temporal belongingness by invoking metaphysical sameness through expressions like "kyā farq hai?" (what's the difference?). Through collective spiritual practices, these women momentarily suspend the Hindu nationalist temporal order that positions them as perpetual outsiders. This study reconceptualizes freedom not as linear progression toward secular liberalism but as a temporal practice of interruption that generates what Elizabeth Povinelli terms "otherwise temporalities," revealing how subaltern subjects can destabilize the politics of difference through religious self-formation.

This paper examines one key aspect of liberal freedom—intellectual autonomy—by exploring how members of an evangelical church in Tennessee responded to a doctrinal shift allowing women in leadership. The debate over women’s leadership exacerbated tensions between competing epistemic virtues, forcing members to confront the limits of their own interpretive authority and the role of social influences in shaping their beliefs. Their tradition emphasizes strict adherence to a divinely ordained pattern for church governance, which they believe can be objectively determined through logical biblical analysis. This means that women who feel called to leadership must challenge not only patriarchal cultural norms but also a long-standing skepticism toward personal religious experiences that contradict verses considered to be "facts of the Bible." This case shows that ideas about freedom are not just political or moral debates—they are also deeply tied to how people decide what counts as true knowledge.

Scattered throughout the urban landscape of Athens, Greece, church-run neighborhood soup kitchens offer pious Orthodox Athenians a place to care for their community and self. In these spaces, the work of cooking for and serving the needy is seen as both a deeply obligatory act of mutual care and a free practice that brings about a loving kingdom of God. The ways that individual practitioners conceived of their carework thus did not align with Western liberal principles of individualism, autonomy, or freedom. Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork and critical attention to theology, I argue that this distinction is the direct result of Orthodox theological ethics which claim that true freedom occurs when one recognizes and acts on the essential relatedness of God and all creation.