Challenges and Futures in Religious Studies

Pre-Conference Discussion

Friday, November 20

7:30-8:30p.m.

Stout Street Social

What is the form and function of a scholarly collective in today’s academia? In challenging times, we increasingly look to forge a sense of cohort and solidarity. Social formations along these lines, however, can be easier imagined than initiated because of the very challenges that motivate them. In this informal and off-site conversation, participants will return to a moment from our national meeting’s archive—specifically, Ivan Strenski’s frustrated take on the conditions under which academic societies meet to discuss research and socialize. Much has changed from that day to this, but the interest in forms of contact that rely on in-person configurations of time and space has resurfaced. What resources do we have at our disposal, and how can we make the most of this moment? What kinds of intellectual and institutional needs do we have, and how might NAASR rise to the occasion of meeting them?

There is limited space for this informal conversation; if you would like to reserve a spot, please email Craig Martin at cmartin@stac.edu.

Business Meeting

Saturday, November 21

9:30-10:00a.m.

Sheraton Governor’s Square 12

The Costs of Preserving Religious Studies

Saturday, November 21

10:00-11:00a.m.

Sheraton Governor’s Square 12

Lee Edelman writes that “For politics, however radical the means by which specific constituencies attempt to produce a more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative, insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child.” This session takes Edelman’s point seriously for religious studies, where the graduate student is quite literally the figure in whom the discipline invests its futurity. Each panelist – themselves PhD candidates trained on the field’s critical apparatus – offers a brief provocation from within Edelman’s frame, examining how the logic of disciplinary reproduction shapes what the field can imagine for itself: what counts as legitimate scholarship, what gets preserved and at what cost, and why alternatives that might require genuine transformation remain foreclosed in favor of transmitting the field as it already is. Their provocations then become the basis for a larger open conversation that asks not what religious studies owes its future but what its commitment to having one – in a specific, recognizable form – forecloses.

Presider: Jacob Barrett, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Mackenzie Oglesby, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Sam Herrmann, University of Pennsylvania

Challenges and Futures in Religious Studies

Saturday, November 21

1:00-2:30p.m.

Sheraton Governor’s Square 12

As the IAHR’s North American regional association, NAASR will be hosting a conversation at this year’s in-person meeting about the state of academia in this region. While the phenomenon of broad-scale institutional challenges is not new (guest editor Gary Lease devoted a special issue of MTSR in 1995 to the “pathologies” characterizing the study of religion in North American universities), the specific infrastructural characteristics of these challenges deserve our attention. Especially since our theoretical commitments ask us to examine the structural workings of power, we are in the intellectual position to explore this moment in higher education not only in terms of its machinations and effects but also in terms of prospective responses and resistances to the same.

We are assembling a discussion with a roundtable format to facilitate analysis that is as forthright and productive as possible. How should we respond to the rapidly changing economic and institutional landscape of academia? How can we demonstrate to our students the importance of thinking critically so as to give them language and tools for their own navigations of the social worlds in which they find themselves? What exactly is our work as scholars of religion in relation to the profession right now? To be clear, and in keeping with NAASR’s priorities regarding method and theory, these questions and their answers should not reinforce a theory/praxis binary. On the contrary, we want to assemble a group of thinkers who can put our particular skills to work in proactively undermining that very binary and demonstrating how needful our scholarship is in this moment.

To discuss the present challenges in and prospective futures of our field, roundtable participants are reading an essay from and about the past that remains strikingly relevant. Russell McCutcheon wrote “Looking Back on the Beginnings: An Historical Survey of Method & Theory Courses in Canada and the U.S.” in 1993 while a PhD student at the University of Toronto. A curricular time capsule from 33 years ago about courses on methods and/or theories across two North American countries stands as a jumping-off point for scholars today as we navigate a new academic generation’s institutional precarity. We encourage everyone to read the essay for themselves as context for the roundtable conversation. McCutcheon’s essay and a number of papers responding to it (including those stemming from the presentations in Denver) will be the material for next year’s Working Papers volume.

Rita Lester, Nebraska Wesleyan University

Marcel Parent, Concordia University

Jacob Barrett, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Martha Smith, Fullerton College

NAASR and Equinox Publishing Reception

Saturday, November 21

7:00-9:00p.m.

Yard House, Sheraton Downtown

Religion Scholars (and Scholarship) and Rising Authoritariansim

Co-sponsored with the Redescribing Christian Origins Seminar of the SBL

Sunday, November 22

9:00-11:30a.m.

Colorado Convention Center, 606

This is a roundtable discussion about the problems of the current political moment. Questions to be discussed include: How is the production of knowledge about early Christianity, and religion more broadly, being influenced or altered by the rise of authoritarianism in the US? Have the scholarly practices or topics of those who study religion been affected? What laws have been proposed or passed that regulate our curriculum, and how are we responding to them? What are the job prospects for PhD students, at a moment when Humanities departments are being defunded and/or dismantled? How are our departments and universities responding? What can we learn from how scholars in the past (or in other parts of the world, in the present moment) responded to authoritarian regimes and anti-intellectualism? What can our field and our expertise offer for making sense of this moment?

Presider: Andrew Durdin, Florida State University

Nicola Denzey Lewis, Claremont Graduate University

Joseph Laycock, Texas State University

Lara-Sophie Boleslawsky, University of Texas at Austin

Stephen Young, Appalachian State University

Rebekka King, St. Francis Xavier University

Michael Graziano, University of Northern Iowa