In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

What would the study of Middle Eastern Christianity look like if scholars put women at the center of their research? This paper adapts the question that Dana Robert posed two decades ago in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research about the study of women in World Christianity in 2006. It focuses on two issues that are central to the future of Middle Eastern Christianity: 1) the critical contributions that women make to Middle Eastern churches; 2) the growth and development of Middle Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant communities in the diaspora, particularly in North and South America. 

This paper examines the phenomenon of "reverse mission" through the ministries of Korean migrant women ministers leading predominantly white Anglo congregations in North America. Drawing on qualitative research with ten first-generation Korean im/migrant ministers, it explores how their leadership reflects broader shifts in global Christianity as missionaries from the global South increasingly minister in the global North, which were historically missionary-sending contexts. The paper first situates these ministers within the historical legacy of American women’s missionary work in Korea, which both expanded and constrained women’s roles in Korean Christianity. I then argue that im/migrant Korean women ministers in white Anglo congregations embody a form of boundary-crossing leadership that reimagines mission, pastoral authority, and preaching. Through postcolonial perspectives, transcontextual preaching strategies, and relational practices rooted in the Korean concept of Jeong, their ministries offer a new vision for the mission of the church that shapes the future witness of increasingly diverse North American churches.

This research addresses a critical gap in the historiography of World Christianity by documenting the overlooked history of South Korean female missionaries. While scholars have extensively analyzed Western women’s roles, non-Western missionary agency remains significantly under-researched. This study uncovers a 1960s "vanguard" of Korean women who pioneered missions in Pakistan—a predominantly Muslim society—a decade before their male counterparts. It explores how these women transitioned from traditional Confucian roles to autonomous transnational agents and contributed to South-South missions. Grounded in archives across Korea and the U.S., this study challenges "West-to-Rest" narratives. It demonstrates that World Christianity in the Global South was not a passive reception of Western ideas, but a dynamic movement led by a non-Western, female-led vanguard that redefined Asian Christian identity.

The future of many Indigenous peoples is increasingly diasporic, shaped by imperial dispossession, militarization, and the threatened loss of land, language, and life. This paper argues that Ryūkyūan Christian women in Hawaiʻi are central architects of Ryūkyūan cultural and theological futures. Although diasporic Uchinānchu comprise only a small portion of Hawaiʻi’s population, they have had an outsized impact on the state’s associational and public life as well as global Uchinānchu networks. Drawing on yuntaku-structured interviews, participant observation, and close reading of community-produced materials, this paper examines how Ryūkyūan Christian women’s everyday labor—care work, ritual organization, intergenerational formation, and public mobilization—constitutes constructive theological work. Situating these practices within longer histories of women-centered religious authority in Ryūkyū, this paper demonstrates how cultural revitalization, identity formation, and sociopolitical commitment become Christian ethical responsibilities. In doing so, this paper offers a distinctly Ryūkyūan addition to global conversations on Indigenous futurities and diasporic theologies.

This paper considers the interlinked phenomena of childbirth, nation-building, and post-traumatic life in the American Jewish diaspora using the case study of a homemade protest sign at the March for Israel rally in November 2023. Irina Barskaya, an American Jewish woman who traveled to Washington for the March, brought with her a sign that read “Bring them home” on one side (a reference to the Israeli hostages taken captive by Hamas on October 7th) and on the other, “Who’s coming home with me? #MakeJewishBabies.” This sign is emblematic of the "continuity paradigm," a pro-natalist mentality that encourages solidarity and futuricity. It presents a successful, preservationist response to trauma, but it also produces biopolitical governmentalities that have the potential to harm Jewish futures, particularly when female Jewish bodies become sites of national reproduction. Ultimately, critical self-examination is required to avoid replicating broader nationalist paradigms and further compromising Jewish women's bodily autonomy.

This paper examines how hagiographical representations of saintly bodies shape “future bodies” through a close reading of the seventeenth-century North Indian verse hagiography Ḥaqīqat al-Fuqarāʾ. Depicting the Punjabi Sufi saint Shāh Ḥusayn (d. 1599) as an antinomian figure, the text offers an extended account of his bodily intimacy with a Brahmin boy named Mādhō. While acknowledging that such intimacy was seen as morally suspect in its context, the narrative reframes it as the saint’s distinctive mode of spiritual instruction. Drawing on recent scholarship in Hagiology, I argue that by juxtaposing the outer appearance and “inner reality” of the saint’s antinomian acts, the Ḥaqīqat interpellates its audience as subjects trained to privilege inner realities when evaluating others, while regulating their own bodily conduct in accordance with prevailing norms. Accordingly, this paper expands understandings of “future bodies” beyond technoscientific enhancement to include the narrative formation of ethically disciplined religious subjects.

The field of disability theologies continues to grow, especially in the so-called “West/Global North.” More voices are appearing from the “Global South” with cautions about how we speak about bodies, disabilities, responsibilities, and opportunities especially within the contexts of settler-colonialism, apartheid/genocide, access to care, and so on (Meekosha). In the world today AI and other technological advancements are rapidly changing healthcare and specifically care of disabled and imperiledbodies. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of bodies are being killed and maimed and land destroyed through AI systems and military operations (Loewenstein). Crip theorists like Jasbir Puar, Mia Mingus, and Alison Kafer, sit uncomfortably within this reality and still dream about crip futures ... futures where crip bodies are desired and we can recognize each other as well as advocate for the end of colonialism, occupation, maiming and genocide. Where might disability theologians sit? 
 

This paper presents a case study from my long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a Theravada Bhikkhuni temple in Thailand, tracing how broad social forces narrow to individual subjectivities through affective, embodied experiences. I argue that emotion functions as the primary mechanism for subjective transformation, not purely as an expression of a ‘true’ inner self, but as an interpersonal and affective force that starts beyond the individual and is gradually internalized.

The case moves from a socially distant promise that temporary ordination will save a family member, through an embodied experience of monastic training, to how judgements of embodied monastic discipline produce emotional turbulence, even fourteen years later. The paper illuminates a process of subjective change I call ‘ExBodiment,’ in which external, intersubjective forces are gradually absorbed through the body to re/shape the very subjectivity through which one moves through the world.

Scholarship on the Hindu body has theorized bodily regulation through ritual purity, devotion, and medicine. While these frameworks focus on social and soteriological dimensions, they do not fully account for the cognitive elements of embodiment. I turn to the Mahābhārata, a Hindu epic, to argue that the text theorizes the body as an epistemic apparatus. I analyze three narratives— Arjuna's emotional breakdown at the eve of war, Nahuṣa’s curse to turn into a snake, and Pāṇḍu’s curse to die— in which the characters lose their capacity to judge due to sensory contact. I argue that the prescriptions about what the bodily senses contact—whether food, fragrant garlands, liquor, or sexual touch—share a concern about protecting the capacity to judge and act well. My analysis reveals an attitude toward the body where the senses are not primarily openings to pollution, but the instruments through which knowledge is accessed or blocked. 

This paper reads three contemporary horror films, the 2022 Hellraiser remake, the Philippous’ Bring Her Back, and Cregger’s Weapons, to evidence the impact of black magic and/or occultism as act of gender destruction in each film. By practicing occult traditions, characters like Gladys in Weapons, Connor/Oliver in Bring Her Back, and Voight in Hellraiser demonstrate societal and mediated fears over secretive religion and gender change. I argue that the interchange between occult and trans bodies continues the conservative impulses of modern horror, solidifying fears of gender transgression, BDSM, and the violation of the child. In doing so, I read these three films with trans monster theory by reading Hil Malatino and Susan Stryker together, in their articulations of trans monstrosity, Stryker’s 1993 “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix” and Malatino’s 2019 Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience.

The relationship between mise-en-scène and Buddhist philosophy has increasingly attracted scholarly attention in studies of Buddhist film. Yet most studies address the intellectual alignment between films and Buddhist teachings, leaving relatively unexplored how cinematic aesthetics generate a Buddhist experience. To address this gap, this paper examines the role of specific elements of mise-en-scène and cinematography in evoking affective encounters with Buddhist concepts. It compares two films that depict violent anti-hero protagonists undergoing moral change: Johnnie To and Wai Kai-fai’s Running on Karma (2003) and Wong Ching-po's The Pig, the Snake, and the Pigeon (2023). By examining blocking, lighting, camera angles and movement, framing, depth of focus, and background music in selected scenes, this paper argues that both films situate moments of transformation within skillfully constructed visual and emotional environments. Together, this research contributes to discussions of how cinematic form shapes viewers' affective engagement with Buddhist ideas and praxis.

This multimedia presentation examines how the 2022 retro-style horror video game FAITH: The Unholy Trinity constructs religious haunting through minimalist visual aesthetics, analog-horror strategies, and making ritual activity interactive. Set during the 1980s Satanic Panic, players assume the role of Father John Ward, a Catholic priest confronting failed exorcisms and demonic cult activity. Sparse pixel graphics and limited animation are punctuated by sudden rotoscoped cutscenes, generating affective dissonance and heightening the sense of intrusion. The crucifix functions simultaneously as a narrative symbol and a gameplay interface, translating liturgical gestures into embodied, interactive ritual. The presentation will integrate curated gameplay clips, in-game “easter egg” production materials, and brief audience participation in a guided playthrough to illustrate these dynamics. By foregrounding how analog-horror aesthetics and digital interaction shape ritualized haunting, this project situates video games as an emergent site for exploring religious imagination and visual culture in contemporary horror media.

In this paper, I will explore a theme we find expressed both in horror fiction and cinema and in folk religion from South America to Southeast Asia: the idea that torturing and killing a human victim creates a magical force that can be redirected by the killer. In this paper, I explore an aspect of haunting that is represented both in horror fiction/cinema and in folk religion from South America to Southeast Asia: the idea that torturing and killing a human victim creates a magical force that can be redirected by the killer. By comparing the way this theme is expressed in a variety of contexts, I will argue that its exemplary cases appear to rely on an earlier and widely shared conceptual framework. This framework, I argue, belongs to a cultural substrate in which supernatural forces are not understood as the impersonal energies hypothesized by 19th-century psychical researchers like William James. Instead, they are understood as active conscious agents that are most often identified as the spirits of victims that are both created and sustained by ritual killing. 

In Tibetan medical and religious texts, leprosy is understood as a type of “serpentine disease” (klu nad), a nosological category that links individual bodily affliction with the agency of serpent spirits and other inhabitants of the animated landscape. This paper examines diagnostic and prognostic techniques for serpentine disease in the Dialogue of the Serpent King and its exegetical tradition, arguing that this literature reveals not a unified healing system but a dialogical negotiation between religious and medical frameworks for anticipating the future course of disease. From the cold-water test for anesthetic “corpse flesh” to decade-long prognostic timelines, Tibetan physicians and ritual specialists developed remarkably precise methods for calibrating futures that neither ritual propitiation nor medicinal intervention could always alter. Incurability, in this literature, emerges not as a failure of medicine or religion but as a diagnosis produced at their intersection.

Healing does not unfold in a vacuum; it is narrated and negotiated by patients, clinicians, families, and communities who define distress, assign its significance, and imagine possible futures and modes of healing. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Christians experiencing bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, this paper argues that visions of healing are influenced and shaped as much by interpretive authority as by symptom profiles. Diagnostic labels can limit future possibilities, whereas recognition—being seen as a person rather than a problem—fosters dignity, belonging, and agency. Integrating lived experiences with narrative theory and a theology of naming, the paper shows how co-narration in care settings shapes future possibilities: the stories communities allow, repeat, and protect create the futures or modes of healing people can live into. The paper proposes a relational model of healing centred on interpretive humility, recognition and shared authority.  

In this article, I examine how religious literacy, specifically in reference to Vodou and other African Diasporic religions, can be thoughtfully incorporated into biomedical pedagogy through the narrative medicine approach. Narrative medicine exists in a reciprocal relationship to self-reflection and listening while in addition building empathy. Given the importance of religion in human experience as well as the negative effects of religious racism, medical training should not be silent on the topic of religion. This silence can further marginalize patients who are likewise devotees of African Diaspora religions by effectively deferring the domain of religion to the ideologies of hegemonic religion. This is not a call to make healthcare providers ‘competent’ or ‘expert’ in non-hegemonic religions, but rather a call to provide them with basic religious literacy to develop understanding. With this effort, providers can be more effective listeners to patients’ religious experience which will facilitate more successful healthcare outcomes. 

This paper takes Eliade’s Shamanism (1951) as a point of departure to examine accusatory and heuristic deployments of “shamanism” in Korean and global contexts. The paper examines uses that demonize indigenous religions as “demonolatry” and superstition and indict the theological orthodoxy of Pentecostal Christian churches, as well as efforts to resurrect the category in celebrating national heritage—most visibly in the 2025 film KPop Demon Hunters. Although critics charge traditional shamans and modern Pentecostals with materialism, both accusations reflect critics’ own materialistic assumptions and ambivalence about material prosperity, troubling the boundary between material and spiritual worlds. Even reclamations of shamanism as heritage risk reducing healing practices to commodified cultural resources. The paper concludes by gesturing toward a possible “Future” suggested by KPop Demon Hunters: the shaman as builder of community based on material, emotional, and spiritual reciprocity—challenging the assumption that shamanism must be defined by archaism rather than adaptability.

This paper will examine a set of Syriac poems (Ephrem’s Madrāshê on Nisibis 1–12) as a case study for how late ancient leaders responded in times of crisis. These poems are primarily framed as laments spoken in the voice of the city of Nisibis, personified as a mourning woman (mother, penitent, and wife). Ephrem used the familiar figure of the mourning woman to guide the feelings of the Christian community in Nisibis in what he regarded as righteous and productive ways. They would receive catharsis (a licit expression of the violence of their emotions), consolation (the prospect that God would ultimately rescue them for the sake of his honor), and correction (to redirect their energies toward the reform of their own “pagan” habits). In short, the poems give voice to communal despair and offer hope for relief in the future. 

Military functions of churches, monasteries, mosques, and other sacred spaces in Late Antiquity are well known. Troops prayed in them before battle, for example. Officers met at these spaces for diplomacy. Arms were stored at temples. In this paper, I will bring to the fore an understudied military function of sacred spaces–their use as war archives. In light of a group of inscriptions, small objects, and texts, I will demonstrate the ways in which temples (here broadly construed to include various types of sacred spaces) were used for documenting and interpreting war. With the storage and exhibition of certain objects, and with the incision of inscriptions, temples documented the communal trauma that came with war, expressed despair, and incited hope. My aim with this study is to complicate our understanding of the making of sacred space and communal identity at the intersection of military and civilian realms in Late Antiquity.

Jacob develops three distinct visual categories of type, pretense, and schema to argue that Sinaitic theophany a) forms Israel as a community and elects them as his own at Sinai, yet b) ultimately identifies the Church as Israel through her vision of Christ. Thus, Jacob borrows and counter-narrates rabbinic exegetical tradition regarding Exodus 19-24. Theophany – and by extension, vision as theological category – mediate communal identity and relation to the other. Theophany has a past and future dimension. As a historical event, Sinaitic theophany is marked by visual and moral failure. Israel therefore cannot claim divine election at Sinai, according to Jacob. Yet, the successful vision of God in the future is not only through the positive content of this “failure”.  Thus, the community that receives the future vision of God must be continuous with the past community. Failure and hope, as well as the past and present communities, are linked.  

The majority of scholars, such as Henry Corbin (d. 1978) and others of Islamic Philosophy, argue that Suhrawardī (d. 1191) was the first Muslim philosopher to seriously use the thought of ancient Persian and Hermetic schools of wisdom in his thought. While the scholars above acknowledge that earlier Muslim philosophers were aware of the thought of the Persians and the Sabians, there is little research on how their thought was actually utilized. This presentation argues that the Brethren placed a significant amount of respect on pre-Zoroastrian religion and Persian culture. Furthermore, they saw the figures within the Zoroastrian religion as spiritual beings who could be incorporated into the Islamic conception of “Oneness of God” (tawḥid). By spiritually incorporating them into the Islamic worldview, one can then invoke them and seek their intercession. It is here that one can see how the Hermetic conception of theurgy manifests in early Islam. 

Famous for her generation-defining short story “The Lottery” and “the definitive haunted house story” The Haunting of Hill House, critics in her own day and beyond have reached for pseudo-spiritual terms to describe Shirley Jackson’s work – haunted, gothic, mythological, primitive, and mysterious – but they do so to cut off the possibility that she could have been “really” religious. This talk will explore the affects her work generates as themselves spiritually meaningful – for Jackson and for her readers – by probing the forms of haunted imagination that emerge from spiritual power that is neither transcendent nor ontologically sticky. Jackson may help us understand the very act of feeling haunted in reading as a form of religion in literature that resists the secular/religious binary. The talk will conclude by exploring what happens to these haunted feelings when Jackson’s work migrates from the literary to the visual, in film and television specifically.

The “ghost paintings” of James Tissot depict supernatural figures that appear in both his society paintings and his late biblical cycle. From The Apparition to his biblical paintings, including He Vanished from Their Sight, The Dead Appear in the Temple, The Dead Appear in Jerusalem, and Jesus Transported by a Spirit onto a High Mountain, Tissot’s paintings present a reenchanted vision of the New Testament for the increasingly secular nineteenth century. His 350-painting collection titled The Life of Christ bears the unmistakable marks of the nineteenth-century fascination with Catholic revivalism, spiritualism, seances, and psychical research. In spite of the fantastical subject matter of these paintings, Tissot depicts Jesus’ miraculous life, death, and resurrection with a startling ethnographic and quasi-documentary precision. Even a century later, Tissot’s ghost paintings remain an example of how nineteenth-century biblical art absorbed and reimagined spiritualism, rendering the Gospel narratives newly strange and uncanny for modern audiences.

This paper examines the imagination and construction of post-colonial futures through the haunting of the "utopian impulse" in two South Korean horror films: The Wailing (2016) and Exhuma (2024). While post-colonial critiques often view utopianism with suspicion, this study utilizes Fredric Jameson, Rubem Alves, and Jacques Derrida to argue that the utopian spirit “to-come” is a necessary subversive force for resisting totalizing systems of injustice. Through a comparative analysis, I explore how both films utilize diverse religious and spiritual frameworks, including Shamanism, Buddhism, Christianity, and animism, to face the historical trauma from the Japanese occupation. I contend that while The Wailing suggests an open-ended nihilistic failure and Exhuma in collaborative resolution, both films ultimately manifest the process of Derrida’s "justice-to-come." These cinematic horror narratives demonstrate that the post-colonial future remains a deferred but persistent haunting—a utopian call to imagine alternative realities despite the lingering horrors of occupation and division.

This paper examines how spiritual power becomes a marketable resource in contemporary Nigerian charismatic and prophetic churches. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across southwestern Nigeria, I analyze the circulation of anointed commodities such as oil, handkerchiefs, bracelets, and prophetic “insurance” packages as infrastructures of religious authority and economic survival. Rather than dismissing these goods as signs of corruption or excess, I argue that they function as vernacular technologies of risk management in contexts of unemployment, state failure, and everyday precarity. Through pricing, branding, and mediated distribution, pastors transform divine access into purchasable protection, recasting spiritual security as exchangeable value. These objects operate as multi-layered currencies that materialize hope while stratifying belonging along lines of class and gender. By theorizing sacred commerce as political economy rather than decline, the paper shows how markets reorganize charisma, inequality, and religious life. The study offers an African grounded account of religion, capitalism, and moral economy.

This paper examines how finance-dominated capitalism at the national scale creates a cycle of debt and a distorted form of desire, focusing on the South Korean housing market, where housing has become an investment rather than a place to live. First, it analyzes South Korean social phenomena in which every facet of life is translated into the language of finance, with particular emphasis on the “Republic of Apartments” phenomenon. Drawing on Kathryn Tanner’s concepts of “chained to the past” and “unbreakable continuity,” this paper illustrates how loans, investments, and housing constitute social inequality. Second, being chained to debt can be understood as a confinement within a self-created, distorted form of desire. Individuals create their own destiny; however, such destiny is markedly constrained. Drawing on the Lord’s Prayer and Jubilee traditions, this paper ultimately suggests radical forgiveness to break the chains of debt and foster a new understanding of religious desire.

This presentation draws from ethnographic research in Brazil to examine the recent paradoxical convergence of prosperity theology and apocalypticism in evangelical circulation of Judeo-Christian imagery. Whereas conventional approaches to Christian nationalism and Zionism tend to emphasize theological beliefs, this presentation draws from media studies and linguistic anthropology to focus on Judeo-Christian imagery as the effect of an evangelical economy of images blending past, present, and future into a universal history available (only) to those who embrace it. I pursue this argument through three case studies: first, I read a widely circulated evangelical theory of the Judeo-Christian origins of Brazil as a retroactive providential narrative running through modern-day Israel. Second, I read US pastor Larry Huch’s visit to Brazil as the formation of a pseudo-ethnic concept of spiritual kinship. Finally, I read a Brazilian seminar based in an Israeli West Bank settlement as a mediatized sanctification of war.

Muslim organizations have been important actors in the development of Muslim halal stand-up comedy circuits. Recognizing comedy's value for fundraising and community outreach, Islamic charities such as Penny Appeal and Human Appeal have run benefit comedy tours across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom since 2015. These organizations have actively advanced the career prospects of numerous Muslim comedians by connecting them with large audiences and increasing their international exposure. Such comedians include US performers Yasmin Elhady, Moses the Comic, Preacher Moss and Omar Regan.

This paper considers how Muslim comics and philanthropists collaboratively intervene and invest in different futures. It specifically analyzes how Muslim comedy participates in the development of new communal horizons, the activation of international solidarities, and the evolution of giving practices. In doing so, it attends to the industry politics shaping the expansion of Muslim comedy circuits and the interdependent relationship between comedy and philanthropy.

Petroleum histories often place oil hunters into opposing camps: the rational, honest geologist (also called rockhound) versus the occult, unscrupulous doodlebugologist (oil diviner) either or both of whom work for the rugged, individualistic wildcatter (independent oil operator). However, this paper argues that framing doodlebug-rockhound relations as a dramatic showdown between occult practices and the scientific method misses the many spatial and rhetorical similarities between the two approaches to petroleum prospecting. Rather than focusing all attention on the line between true versus false subsurface methods, I argue that wildcatters, rockhounds, and doodlebugs work together to shift the stratigraphy of truth (scientific, mythic, and divine) from heavenly heights to hidden depths. Thinking doodlebugology with, rather than against, geology demonstrates the ways both fields help usher in a respatialization of truth as something buried, and value as that which comes from correctly locating and extracting this hidden substance.

This paper explores two photo collections by the feminist photographer Susan Meiselas, Carnival Strippers and A Room of Their Own, which respectively center the experiences of sex workers and domestic abuse survivors. Both photo series bring visibility to the lived experiences of women typically erased by the church. Moralizing narratives tend to structure Christian conversations around sex work or those who escape abusive relationships. These church-driven narratives lead to these women’s stories being simplified or judged without engaging in systemic analysis of the structures that contributed to their current situation. By engaging with the photos and stories of these women, with the work of feminist and womanist theologians, theorists, and ethicists, I hope to show an engagement with sex workers and domestic violence survivors that reshapes the narrative, engages with discomfort, and centers women’s voices over church authority. 

“The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray was a twentieth-century human rights activist, legal scholar, author, labor organizer, poet, Episcopal priest, multiracial Black, LGBTQ+ Durhamite who lived one of the most remarkable lives of the 20th century.” What does this remarkable poet and priest have to teach us about time, temporality, and history? This presentation examines Murray’s theological view of history in their poem Dark Testament. I argue Murray’s theo-poetics disrupts our conceptions of linear time and racial progress. Instead, Murray tarries with America’s history of sexual subjection, chattel slavery, and settler colonialism to direct the reader to its repetitions and backslides. In doing so, Murray offers us a cross-shattered conception of history, one which locates Christ in solidarity with victims of racial violence. 

Feminist theories and theologies have frequently grounded critiques of patriarchy in shared scenes of sexual trauma, presuming a foundational injury that structures women’s experiences. This paper argues that the persistent alignment of (sexual) injury with women’s experience has sometimes been wielded as a defense against attending to sexualized and racialized attachments that also sustain feminist theological desires and imaginations. In response, this paper demonstrates the utility of moving away from trauma-centric considerations of structural subordination in feminist theology. The paper asks not how identities are grounded in shared experiences of trauma, but how configurations of race, gender, and sexuality take form and acquire theological force. This shift opens space for a transfeminist theological approach attentive to the attachments that sustain feminist theological imaginations, including those that reproduce whiteness and transantagonism. 

This project examines how Dalit women’s bodies in the caste system are imperilled within  the cultures of purity and pollution. Jeevana, is used as both an ethic and methodology to analyze the paradox of “touch” surrounding Dalit women’s bodies. It is a Kannada term refers to the experience of being alive, living, and the unfolding of human events and activities. However, for Dalit Women it signifies everyday acts of resistance against the interconnected oppressions of caste, class, and gender. Although Dalit women are defined as untouchable and impure, their bodies become “touchable” only in situations of violation; therefore, I term their bodies as un/touchable. This project asks why men from caste communities as well as Dalit communities perceive that Dalit women’s bodies can be touched anytime, anywhere, and everywhere without their consent. It argues that un/touchable bodies exist as witnesses carrying memories of abuse and discrimination, not as victims but resisters of oppression and oppressors.

A Jain anti-animal sacrifice activist stumbling over an overgrown ancient sacred site and kick- starting a whole new genre of travel writing. A remote hilltop rock temple dedicated to Āṭinātar-Ṛṣabha turning into the central pilgrimage site for the Jains of the Tamil-speaking region. An anti-mining protest event sparking the creation of ecologically inspired walks across the Jain landscape of the hills surrounding Madurai. This talk will take these three moments in the history of the Jain community of the Tamil-speaking region to reflect on visions for the reclaiming of spaces that help re-create a Jain landscape out of a scenario of marginalisation, destruction, and endangerment. The remembered, imagined, and projected voyage up the mountain will confront both larger historical practices of Jain pilgrimage and concrete cases of reconfiguration in a period crucial for the transformation of the diverse communities practising Jainism in contemporary Tamil Nadu.

Contemporary Jain laymen take great pride in their organisation of pilgrimages. To plan a pilgrimage is to partake in the actions associated with the great saṅghpatis of old, whose lavish and extraordinary pilgrimage arrangements are the stuff of legend. But even for lower-middle and middle-class Jain laymen, saṅghpati narratives create a template of Jain masculinity from which Jain laymen draw inspiration for their choice of Jain participation. Contemporary laymen used this term in the abstract to describe men who led pilgrimages and made arrangements for Jain processions. The saṅghpati illuminates the merchant skills of diplomacy, management and organisation, knowledge of resources, maintaining a network of connections, and strategic planning. But these skills matter not just for garnering the coveted status as a saṅghpati but also as a mark of masculine leadership and management skills. Thus, Jain pilgrimage provides a site for the creation of a new form of saṅghpati.

This paper examines the emergence of Bhomiyā Jī Mahārāja, the guardian deity at the foothill of Śikharajī (Pārasnātha Hill), and situates his worship within longer histories of landholding, protection, and mediated access to the mountain. While Śikharajī is the most revered Jain tīrtha, sanctified by the liberation of twenty tīrthaṅkaras, ascent has historically required negotiation with territorial authorities. Drawing on colonial revenue records, court cases, Jain tīrthamālā literature, and vernacular pamphlets, the paper traces how guardianship shifted from the Bhuiyan Raja of Palganj under the ghatwālī tenure system to institutional Jain trusts in the colonial and postcolonial periods. I argue that Bhomiyā Jī does not replace earlier intermediaries but condenses their functions into a divine form. His shrine materialises structural continuities in authority even as legal regimes transformed property, sovereignty, and recognition, foregrounding questions of Adivasi dispossession and sacred access.

The paper examines how, for Śvetāmbara Mūrtipūjaka Jains, a tīrthayātrā (pilgrimage) can be performed through bhāva ('cultivated action-disposition') without visiting a physical tīrthakṣetra—a practice called bhāvayātrā. This is often undertaken using a tīrtha paṭa, an abstract cartographic map of pilgrimage places. The paper explores the semantic and phenomenological dimensions of bhāva. It particularly examines how bhāva operates as an enabler of learning, cultivation, and dispositional transformation in practice and how it constitutes actions. It also examines how tīrtha paṭa allows realisation of place without physical presence. Analysing the Caityavandana Sūtras, contemporary Gujarati Jain texts, and practitioners’ oral histories to frame bhāvayātrā, the paper challenges reductive translations of bhāva as ‘emotion’ or ‘feeling’ and reconstrues it as ‘cultivated action-disposition’. It argues that bhāvayātrā enables pilgrims to reconfigure their dispositions towards the qualities of tīrthaṅkaras, foregrounding bhāva as a generative category for understanding tīrthayātrā in the Śvetāmbara Mūrtipūjaka Jain tradition.