CO-SPONSORED SESSION: Cultural History of the Study of Religion Unit and Religion, Colonialism, and Postcolonialism Unit

Race and Research: Despite the field’s storied emphasis on interdisciplinarity and methodological self-reflection, the field of Religious Studies has fallen short when it comes to critical reflection about the racialization of the discipline and its methods. This failure–and sometimes outright refusal–of critical engagement often happens simultaneously with official initiatives in which new ranks of scholars of color are recruited into the field. We invite proposals for papers, panels, or roundtables that engage the questions and contradictions emerging at the impasse of institutional diversity initiatives and anti-racist, anti-colonial critique. What is the relationship between them? What does it mean for specifically racialized scholars to adopt the study of religion and its various disciplinary forms–the archive, the field, the language seminar? To what extent does our presence in the guilds of religious studies confirm disciplinary integrity, create conditions for interdisciplinarity, or something else? What politics emanate from these spaces of racialized research?