Interlocutions II

“Crisis is not exceptional to history or consciousness but a process embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what’s overwhelming.” (Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2011)

“There is nothing more difficult to convey than reality in all its ordinariness.” (Pierre Bourdieu, On Television, 1998)

Last year’s NAASR program brought discourses in other academic fields to bear on the study of religion, examining new directions for our field moving forward. The 2025 meeting will advance this interdisciplinary endeavor more specifically by hosting discussions aimed at exploring how, in our scholarly methodologies and vocabularies—whether in our field or in others—we draw distinctions between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Scholars in religious studies have staked out a particular corner of the broad humanistic charge to “make the strange familiar and the familiar strange,” sometimes separating out an aspect of the mundane and presenting it as exceptional, and sometimes taking what others consider exceptional and demonstrating how it is, in fact, exceedingly mundane. Such scholarly moves reflect the deepest currents of our methodological agendas, including the critiques our field has offered of the arbitrary lines separating the sacred from the profane, the “savage” from the “civilized,” and the normal from the pathological.

This year’s papers will depart from well-trod avenues of inquiry; rather than revisit, e.g., the sacred/profane or religious/secular dichotomies (on which there is already a massive literature), we hope to see interventions that draw attention to less-studied forms of exceptionalizing or reducing, including (but not limited to) narratives of crisis, normalization, exception, societal structuration, and the everyday. What forms of methodological exceptionalizing or reducing seem necessary for us to accomplish our work? How can the field move forward with a more nuanced understanding of the stakes of distinguishing the ordinary and the extraordinary? How do scholars treat social phenomena as exceptional or ordinary and how/why these distinctions emerge in our data, our methodologies, and our theoretical frameworks? 

The program takes inspiration from the challenge implicit in Bourdieu’s claim that “There is nothing more difficult to convey than reality in all its ordinariness,” and in Lauren Berlant’s treatment of “crisis” not as an exceptional event but a process that produces and shifts the boundaries of what counts as ordinary. Such an emphasis necessarily alters the way we might think of a wide range of discourses, from a “crisis of faith” to the “crisis” in the humanities, and beyond.

Virtual Programming | Saturday, November 15

“Deconstruction and the Science of Religion”

In-Person Programming | Friday, November 21-Sunday, November 23

Friday, November 21

Resituating Religious Studies

• “Ordinary Violence: Recasting Religious Studies through Intersectional and Postcolonial Perspective,” Gaudencia Mudada, University of Zimbabwe 
• “The Ordinary as Extraordinary in its Ordinariness: Considering the Storytelling Methods of John Berger, Walter Benjamin, and Subcomandante Marcos,” Richard J. Callahan, Jr. Gonzaga University
• “The Longitudinal Trap and an Absence of Meaning,” Aidan Nuttall, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill
• “Routinizing the Crisis: Religious Studies’ Permanent Exception,” William Underwood, Oberlin College 
• “Conveying Yester-Everyday: Seeking, Recognizing, and Communicating the Extra/ordinary Religious Contexts, Crisis, and Repose in Premodernity,” Thomas Waldrupe, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill 

Respondent, Vaia Touna, University of Alabama 

Relational Forms

• “Unsettling Settlement: The Ordinary Monstrosity of Encampment in Lawrence, KS, 1870 – present,” Rachel Schwaller (publication name: Rachel E. C. Beckley), University of Kansas
• “Ordinary Methods, or The Style of Innovative Scholarship,” Jacob Barrett, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill
• “Pan-Relationalism and the Extra/ordinary,” Sam Calderwood, Independent Scholar
• “Mycological Reason: Thinking with (Extra)Ordinary Fungi in the Ruins of Late Capitalism,” Isaiah Ellis, Southern Methodist University
• “A Preliminary Thought on Panpsychism: Its Implications for the Human Sciences and the Study of Religion,” Mitsutoshi Horii, Shumei University

Respondent, Andrew Durdin, Florida State University

Political Imaginaries

• “The Mundane in the Crisis of Democracy,” Ross Moret, Florida State University
• “Americanism in the Polycrisis,” Thomas J. Carrico, Jr., Independent Scholar
• “From Exception to Everyday? : Rethinking the Extra/ Ordinary in Modi’s India,” Ridhima Sharma, University of Toronto 
• “Illegal Immigrant or Asylum Seeker?: U.S. Discourses on Immigration and a Hierarchy of Rights,” Carlos Ruiz Martinez, University of Iowa
• “Rebellion as Discourse: Investigating Resistance in ‘Islamic’ Societies,” Shamim Hossain, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill

Respondent, Sierra Lawson, University of Wyoming

Saturday, November 22

Business Meeting

11:00am-12:00pm

Hilton Boston Back Bay, Belvidere Ballroom, Salon A

Contextualizing Crisis without Universalism

“Crisis” was a common theme among the paper proposals we received, and we have also seen an increase in “crisis” rhetoric across the last few years, especially in North America. Today we often read about political crises, constitutional crises, a crisis of the humanities, a crisis caused by generative AI, a crisis caused by a decline in the reading comprehension skills of students, and more. However, identifying a “crisis” always reflects a set of investments–one person’s crisis might always be another person’s revolution. In The German Ideology, Marx wrote that “each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.” For this final roundtable, we ask participants to consider this question: how can we theorize “crisis” in higher education or in the study of religion without universalizing a particular set of interests?

• Ting Guo, University of Toronto
• James Dennis LoRusso, University of North Florida
• Karen deVries, University of Colorado–Colorado Springs
• Robyn Faith Walsh, University of Miami
• Adrian Hermann, University of Bonn

NAASR Annual Keynote

“Where Is Theology?”

Sunday, November 23

Author Meets Critics: Chris Zeichmann’s Radical Antiquity: Free Love Zoroastrians, Farming Pirates, and Ancient Uprisings

In Radical Antiquity, Chris Zeichmann considers a wide variety of communities in the Greco-Roman world that were organized anarchically, demonstrating that there is a long history of radical, non-hierarchical human collectives. In the vein of Graeber and Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything, but written for a popular audience, Radical Antiquity invites scholars to reflect on how we can make our scholarship accessible to non-scholarly readers, as well as how our research might have more than an antiquarian relevance. 

• Erin Roberts, moderator
• Chance Bonar, panelist (10 mins)
• Andrew Durdin, panelist (10 mins)
• Naomi Goldenberg, panelist (10 mins)
• Gillian Le Fevre, panelist (10 mins)
• Kevin Wing-Chui Wong, panelist (10 mins)
• Rita Lester, panelist (10 mins)

Christopher B. Zeichmann, response (10 minutes)

Open discussion (50 minutes)