In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper examines how Tanzanian media personality Leila Abubakar Chamshama (“Madam Leila”) constructs Islamic authority as a woman without traditional scholarly training through her weekly “Mondays with the Psychologist” segments on Radio Nuur in Tanga. Drawing on ethnographic observation, linguistic analysis, and recordings from 2023–2025, I argue that Madam Leila exemplifies adjacent authority—a hybrid, gendered mode of legitimacy grounded in Islamic moral discourse, professional psychological expertise, Swahili concepts of sitara and heshima, and the affordances of contemporary Islamic media. Through trilingual code‑switching and a mix of therapeutic and Islamic idioms, she offers ethical guidance to mixed‑gender publics while strategically deferring to male scholars on doctrinal matters. Her broadcasts expose a paradox: she incisively critiques structural male behavior yet often counsels women to accommodate those very patterns. The case illustrates how Islamic media in East Africa expand women’s public religious voice even as they reproduce enduring gendered constraints.

This paper examines how Islamic Studies is taught in African universities through a comparative analysis of Bayero University Kano and the University of Jos. It argues that university Islamic Studies programs occupy an epistemologically liminal space between the transmission of classical Islamic sciences — including fiqh, tafsīr, ḥadīth, and kalām — and the methodological demands of the modern academy. Drawing on curricular analysis, interviews, and madrasa comparisons, the study analyzes pedagogical design, language of instruction, and structures of scholarly authority. It highlights a linguistic and epistemological divide in which madrasa graduates often develop encyclopedic mastery of Arabic textual traditions, while university curricula are structured to provide training in critical historiography, research methodology, and interdisciplinary approaches to the academic study of Islam, though preliminary findings suggest uneven implementation. By placing these institutional formations in dialogue, the paper interrogates the future of Islamic Studies in African higher education.

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Argentina, Barbados, Mexico, and the U.S./Mexico borderlands to examine emergent Muslim infrastructures and embodied forms of knowledge production beyond traditional centers of Islamic authority. Focusing on migrant shelters in Mexico, philanthropic and professional networks in the eastern Caribbean, and halal export initiatives in and from Argentina, I suggest that these so-called peripheries are generative sites of Islamic innovation and Muslim futurism. These cases recast religious authority as infrastructural, gendered, and commercially embedded, while challenging dominant frameworks that equate Muslim politics with state power or Islamism. In conversation with the theme “Futures / Future(s),” the paper suggests that Muslim communities in the Americas are crafting locally grounded yet globally entangled political and religious futures that reconfigure hierarchies of knowledge and representation within the contemporary landscapes of globalized Islam.

This paper considers the importance of place in Nigerian transnational religion. It centers the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), a Nigerian Pentecostal institution, to examine how Nigerian faithways in the US are shaped across the Atlantic. The RCCG is one of the organizations that have positioned Nigeria as the hub of Pentecostalism in the world. Besides its Nigerian core in Lagos, the RCCG has its American core in Texas which has the largest population of Nigerians in the US. The existing connection between Texas and Nigeria creates a transcultural community sustained to a large extent by mobility. It posits that institutions and norms that migrants take with them do not always terminate at destination points but often become part of the continuous exchanges across certain nodes of movement. Using oral interviews, the paper argues that established migrant religious institutions are part of, and better facilitate, these exchanges.

This presentation examines the role of Christian faith in identity formation and communal belonging among Chinese American and Chinese Korean Christians. Christianity, given its universalist assumptions regarding one God over all creation, provides inherently transcultural resources for shaping self and community perceptions. In both the United States and South Korea, Chinese migrant churches provide practical and relational resources for settling and building community. But behind these well attested phenomena is a complex negotiation of culture and identity for Sinophone Christians whose national, ethnic, and cultural belongings resist simple categorization. This research, based on interviews and participant observation with Chinese American and Chinese Korean Christians and congregations, investigates and compares how Sinophone Christians of multi-cultural backgrounds utilize their faith to make transcultural sense of their migratory contexts and situations.

The presence of Muslim communities in Japan is often framed as a product of recent globalization. This paper challenges that view, situating Islamic communal life within longer historical and institutional processes. Drawing on the historical research of Muslim migration and theoretical insights from migration studies and institutional development, it examines how Muslims navigate Japan’s postwar dual labor markets and regulated immigration regimes. Migration decisions, embedded in transnational networks linking sending and host societies, are shaped by structural factors rather than individual economic incentives alone. Over time, these processes foster the gradual emergence of mosques, religious networks, and community organizations that sustain Islamic life in a society where Muslims remain a small minority. By situating Muslim migration in historical and institutional context, this paper contributes to broader discussions on the development of Islamic diasporas and the roles of institutions in shaping religious life beyond Muslim-majority regions. 

This paper examines how migration and transcultural processes shape religious identity through an ethnographic study of women’s leadership in the Hindu Adhiparasakthi tradition in the United States. Using human‑geographic approaches that understand belonging as an active practice, it explores how gender, migration, and religious authority intersect as women increasingly serve as ritual specialists, signaling a shift from traditionally male‑centered models. The NJ community has evolved into a multistate hub for ritual praxis and belonging, strengthened by digital communication technologies adopted during the 2020 pandemic. These tools have broadened participation, deepened transnational ties, and supported efforts to establish a new temple, anchoring collective identity and cross‑border religious networks. The study highlights multidirectional patterns linking digital media, ritual practice, and community engagement, showing how global and local iterations of community adapt inherited forms to new social and geographic contexts and how transcultural processes continually reshape communal identities.

Adopting the post-secular as a critical posture for engaging the humanistic study of law, this paper seeks to render explicit legal positivism’s “religious memory” and its persistence within a “religious archive.”  By analyzing the account of legal obligation that distinguishes HLA Hart’s brand of positivism from earlier command theories of law, I attempt to show that this view of legal obligation presupposes an individual’s knowledge of some set of social facts whose recognition is deemed necessary for a community’s survival and, by extension, the ability to discern them.  This capacity for discernment, I contend, recovers and modifies a form of observational rationality, disused by command theorists, but inherited from the natural law tradition.  Such rapprochements with the intellectual reserves of law’s religious archive, I conclude, are particularly important in the present political moment, in which the line between law and sovereign command is increasingly blurred.

This paper introduces the necessity of a postsecular conception of capitalism as religion as an intervention into the discourse of postsecularity and its tendency to reduce the significance of capitalism and its concrete material and social processes in its analysis of religion, culture, and politics. Taking William E. Connolly's project in Capitalism and Christianity as a postsecular framework that tackles this question, I point to the limitations of Connolly's analysis in his reformist conclusions and the relative autonomy he gives to cultural theological formations. Instead, I argue that a synthesis of Benjamin's and Marx's conceptions of capitalism as religion is necessary to an adequate postsecular analysis of capitalist assemblages. I then address the three political options of re-enchantment, disenchantment, and what I term counter-enchantment in the context of this analysis of capitalism as religion. 

When bureaucratic processes stall for days—servers are down, requirements seem constantly shifting, and no one is able (or willing) to say why—what keeps citizens from abandoning the process altogether? Dependency may explain why citizens cannot easily exit stalled bureaucratic processes, but it does not explain how encounters repeatedly close without resolution yet avoid rupture—i.e., the interpretive and moral work that makes continued participation bearable and even livable at times. Based on fieldwork in Ahmedabad’s citizen service centres, I illustrate how everyday welfare governance in Gujarat depends on vernacular theodicies that make delay and non-resolution bearable. In these moments, secularity is not the absence of religion (i.e., transcendental power) but the redistribution of transcendence into procedural abstractions, promissory timelines, and moral horizons that exceed the office. I argue that vernacular theodicies are how secularity is practically sustained within one of India’s prevalent forms of secularism: managerial secularism. 

In November 2018, indigenous Brazilian artist Denilson Baniwa staged a ritual intervention at the 33rd São Paulo Biennial, one of the largest stages in Brazilian contemporary art. Critiquing the exhibition’s representation of indigenous people, Denilson marched through the galleries wearing a yellow jaguar mask and a leopard cape, inhabiting the “jaguar-shaman”—a Baniwa intermediary between human, animal, plant and more-than-human worlds. “Hacking” the biennial, he performed a ritual critique, contesting ideas about modernity and indigenous art while confronting the exhibition’s complicity in settler colonialism. This paper analyzes this performance and its afterlife. Using the framework of “secular aesthetics,” I argue Denilson’s ritual critique was a constitutive part of his attachment to the museum as an institution with redemptive potential for civic life. I analyze his work to demonstrate the “absorptive quality” of secular aesthetics, showing how art museums have absorbed and performed ritual critiques, exhibitionary alternatives, and decolonial imaginaries.

Science fiction author Philip K. Dick spent the final 8 years of his life writing an “Exegesis,” a handwritten theological journal attempting to understand a series of visionary experiences he underwent in 1974. As with in fictional works like The Game-Players of Titan, Dick drew on images of games and play throughout his theological writing, viewing God’s creation of the universe as a playful act and religious responses to it as a form of play. Ultimately, the “Exegesis” itself is a form of theological play, an effort not to establish a definitive truth but rather to devise compelling and unusual hypotheses. This paper will explore Dick’s use of playful imagery in the “Exegesis” and its place in his developing self-conception.

Philip K. Dick’s February 1974 “pink beam” experience was triggered by a vision of a pink beam of light containing information from on high, triggered by his seeing an icthys necklace. This marked a decisive shift in his sense of self and reality. Following this event, Dick claimed access to hidden knowledge, described the world as a “Black Iron Prison,” and began composing the sprawling theological journal known as the Exegesis. Drawing on cognitive neuroscience accounts of decentering, I argue that these experiences can be understood as a redistribution of epistemic authority beyond the stable narrative self, producing both ontological destabilization and sustained attempts at reintegration.

This paper asks how informational objects can exhibit properties of living intelligence. Focusing on Philip K. Dick’s concept of plasmate in VALIS and the Exegesis, it rereads this mythologized “living information” through Bernard Stiegler’s theory of tertiary memory and N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of unthought. Rather than psychologizing or mystifying Dick’s late writings, the paper argues that plasmate anticipates contemporary concerns about informational agency in the age of AI. Stiegler explains plasmate’s temporal persistence as exteriorized technical memory that shapes thought across generations, while Hayles accounts for its nonconscious cognitive operations. At their intersection, plasmate appears as tertiary memory imagined as alive and unthought experienced as revelation—offering a speculative grammar for understanding distributed intelligence beyond the human.