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Repair, Abolish, Hope

Fall 2022 Seminar

There are words and concepts that suffer from a precariousness of meaning. They sound right but they lost their edge, their symbolic efficiency, and their revolutionary potential. Words like Freedom, Repair, Abolition, Hope, Resistance, Resilience, Debt, and Love are dangerously trendy, victims of a disarming fluency and targets of an ahistorical appropriation. In these rough times, what does it mean to recover the lost imaginations associated with these words, to contemplate new beginnings, and to dream of new futures, or as D.G. Kelley says, invoking the poet Jayne Cortez, “to envision ‘somewhere in advance of nowhere’.”

For months last year we read about crisis and urgency, heard authors probe us about why we write and for whom, and listened to artists and scholars plead for the quiet, the pause, the incomplete, the dysfluent, and the bliss of coalition in times of duress. In the next few weeks, and in the same spirit of generous fellowship, we will focus on why, how, and whether we should read and write reparatively, not as a nostalgic impulse to restore things to an original state, but to harness an intellectual and social energy that makes new worlds possible because what good is critique if it fails to create?

We will invite farmers, artists, environmentalists, scholars, and teachers who infuse their practice with an obsessive will to repair as to make ready again for change, to correct course, and to transcend our habit to diagnose the ills of the world. Imagine if our doctors stopped being healers and focused solely on pathologizing. In addition to our epistemology (or pathology) of suspicion and deconstruction, what if we could breathe a sensibility of repair and abolition in our tools of critique? What if we could adopt a mindset of fierce care and a craving for building anew? What would that look like in the practice of our research, in the pedagogy in our classrooms, and in the habits of our assembly?

Our goal is to bolster the CMRC seminar beyond the conventional formats we have rehearsed in academia for far too long. We take notice that our habits and rhythms need to change and be recalibrated for a different moment. The abolitionist scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore says that abolition is not an act of destruction but a generative practice of transformation, and most importantly, of ‘making place’ to produce the conditions and gather the resources for change. Our seminar will make place, but we first have to answer the questions: what needs to be abolished and repaired, why, and to make space for what? Let us be clear that Repair, Abolition, Hope are not seductive slogans we use to make us feel good or trophies we carry to appear woke. Instead, we hear in these words a clarion call that forces us to ask, what is to be done, with whom, and how? Nor are these words places we arrive at or destinations we travel to. They are primarily journeys of struggle and a sensibility of practice towards reproductive justice for all. This seminar is much more than a space of study. It is an (our) attempt to get free.

Description

This weekly Seminar is a major component of the research and teaching mission of the Centerfor Media, Religion and Culture. It brings together faculty, graduate students, and visitingfellows from a variety of academic fields with an interest in media and religion. Center fellows explore leading literature in a variety of academic fields, including media studies, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, social theory, and philosophy. Students also receive concrete training in research development, methodology, and analysis, and are mentored through the development of conference presentations and publications.

Center Projects

Public Religion and Public Scholarship in the Digital Age:

A research project (January 2017 through December 2022) funded by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation (New York) in the amount of $500,000. The purpose of the project is to explore and develop a new role for scholars of religion in shaping public understanding of religion and improving public and political discourses about religion. Due to changes in media, religion today is no longer limited to private experience or what goes on inside the walls of churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. Religion is being remade by media, and religious, academic, cultural, and political actors need new understandings of its shape and its role. The project brings experts on religion and experts on media together in a common effort to “jump start” new research and innovation that takes advantage of the digital age. It will pilot new means of research and collaboration between scholars and broader communities and new means of communication the results of these collaborations.

Major Activities under the Grant:

1. A Working Group of leading scholars and practitioners from the fields of media studies and religious studies. The four investigators from CMRC will also be full members of this Working Group.:
-Sarah Banet-Weiser, Annenberg School of Communication USC and University of Pennsylvania.
-Anthea Butler, University of Pennsylvania
-Nabil Echchaibi, University of ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder
-Chris Helland, Dalhousie University
-Stewart Hoover, University of ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder
-Marwan Kraidy, Northwestern University, Qatar.
-Mirca Madianou, Goldsmiths, University of London
-Peter Manseau, The Smithsonian
-Jenna Supp-Montgomerie, University of Iowa
-Nathan Schneider, University of ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder
-Sarah McFarland Taylor, Northwestern University
-Deborah Whitehead, University of ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder

2. Working Group members are each engaged in a research project relevant to the theme and objectives of the Project. The grant provides a limited amount of graduate funding for CMCI Graduate Students to collaborate on these projects and receive support for their own contributions.

3. A major conference on the theme of the project was organized by the Center in August 2018 in Boulder, in collaboration with the International Society for Media, Religion, and Culture. Keynote speakers were: Anthea Butler, John Durham Peters, and Merlyna Lim.

4. The project is supported by purpose-designed web platform through which we experiment and explore the possibilities for digital collaboration, research design, circulation of ideas and findings, and new ways of doing scholarship in a public way. The site, called , was launched in 2017.

5. A book volume is in progress with the tentative title of Hypermediations: Essays on Religion, Media, and Crisis , edited by Nabil Echchaibi, Stewart Hoover, Nathan Schneider, and Deborah Whitehead. The book explores how media and religion converge in the making and habitation of overlapping crises that call on us today. Scholars in media studies and religious studies will present new research while reflecting on the impossible demands that today’s sense of continuing crisis place on the vocation of scholarship.

6. A Center’s Publication focused on the same themes of this project in which fellows are invited to write 500-1200-word reflections on how their research is impacted by the call to respond to the urgency of our times.

Expectations

Fellows are encouraged to get involved in center projects over the course of each semester. Our fellows are also invited to do one presentation per year on their research and creative work. These are great opportunities to share your work and get valuable feedback. This semester, each fellow will present their reflection essay in an event we will hold in October. We will discuss this event in our first meeting this fall. You can also contribute to the center by helping with the design and content maintenance of our website, curating the accounts of our social media, or volunteering to organize our events. Please consult with the faculty of the center on how you can best use your time and expertise in these projects or if you have other ideas for collaboration and outreach.

SCHEDULE & READINGS

Week 1 - 8/31 Introductions of Faculty and Fellows
-Discussion of the Theme: Repair, Abolish, Hope
Readings: On Rehearsing Together
-”Every Day We Must Get Up and Relearn the World An Interview with Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson”
Optional : Grace Lee Boggs, “These Are the Times that Grow Our Souls”
Week 2 - 9/7 The Limits of Critique
Readings:
-Warren S Goldstein, Rebekka King, Jonathan Boyarin, On a balanced critique: (or on the limits of critique)
-Ananda Abeysekara, At the Limits of the Secular: History and Critique in Postcolonial Religious Studies

Week 3: 9/14 Reparative Reading
Readings:
-Eve Sedgwick, Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading
-Eve Tuck, “Rematriating Curriculum Studies”
- Optional: Jasbir Puar, “Introduction” of The Right to Maim Debility, Capacity, Disability
Presentation:
- Nabil Echchaibi , Media Studies
Week 4: 9/21 Pedagogies of Repair
Readings:
- Usah Iyer, “A Pedagogy of Reparations: Notes toward Repairing the Film and Media Studies Curriculum”

Presentation:
- Deborah Whitehead , Associate Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Associate Director of the CMRC
Week 5: 9/28 Writing in the Wake…, Wakeful Work.
Readings:
-Christina Sharpe, “The Wake” in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Optional: Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, “To Restitute” in The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics. pp. 27-42.
Presentation:

-Nathan Schneider, Assistant Professor of Media Studies
Week 6: 10/5 On Invention, Innovation, Old, and New
Readings:
- David Edgerton, “Introduction” and “Significance” in The Shock of the Old
Presentation:
- Steven Frost: Sewing Rebellion
Week 7: 10/12 Critical Black Futures
Readings:
-Philip Butler, “Newhampton: A Future Forward(ifed) Black City in the United States”
Presentation:
- Philip Butler , Professor Iliff Theology Seminary, Denver
Week 8: 10/19 On Abolition, Making Place, and What Is to Be Done.
Readings:
-W.E.B. Du Bois, “The General Strike” in Black Reconstruction in
America
-Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy pp.53-69
Week 9: 10/26 Resilience and Flexibility
Readings:
- McRuer, “Introduction: Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence”
- Jasbir Puar, “Treatment Without Checkpoints” in The Right to Maim.

Presentation:
- Samira Rajabi , Assistant Professor of Media Studies.

Week 10: 11/2 On Environmental Justice, Ritual, and Mindfulness
Readings: TBA
Presentation:
- Ramon Parish , Assistant Professor In Naropa University’s Interdisciplinary Studies
Week 11: 11/9 On Sustainable Farming and Food Equity
Readings: TBA
Presentation:
- Fatuma Emmad , CO-Founder, Executive Director and Head Farmer of Front Line Farming.
Week 12: 11/16 On Indigenous Resurgence
Readings:
-Leanne Betasamosake (2014). “Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation.”
-Natalie Avalos, “The Metaphysics of Decolonization: Healing Historical Trauma and Indigenous Liberation”
Presentation:
- Natalie Avalos , Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and Board Member of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies, ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder
Week 13: 11/23 Workshop: On What is to be Done
Week 14: 11/30 Workshop: On What is to be Done