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On Reparative Decoloniality

Spring 2023 Seminar

As we gather, we honor and acknowledge that the University of ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ’s four campuses are on the traditional territories and ancestral homelands of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Ute, Apache, Comanche, Kiowa, Lakota, Pueblo and Shoshone Nations. Further, we acknowledge the 48 contemporary tribal nations historically tied to the lands that comprise what is now called ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ.

Spring Seminar Focus

Last spring, we started with an invocation to turn our Center’s seminar into a sanctuary of collective study, a fugitive haven of sorts, to ask other questions, to weave new gatherings, to listen to unusual voices, and to hold one another in thinking, listening, and writing. A frightening global pandemic forced us to see injuries before they turned into scars. The ugliness of our world appeared both unforgiving and lyrical. Our myths of justice, of empathy, of security, of mobility, of democracy turned urgently suspect in a time of brutal transparency. Even our words sounded futile, hollow sounds in a relentless chorus of platitudes and slogans. But then came the lyrical moment as a sense of loss, anger, fear, failure, but also inevitable hope overwhelmed us all. An opening burst in front of us, inviting those who were ready and willing to abandon things, to scramble things, to abolish things, to repair things, and to believe again in the undimmable energy of small action. That opening, though fleeting, was (is) the unexpected rhapsody in our common tragedy. We needed a jolt away from the grand narratives of progress, the deceit of technology, the hubris of information, and the cults of speed, visibility, and efficiency. Despite its ambers of death, the pandemic reminded us of an inner spirituality of being together, of listening for the unsaid, of seeing ourselves as “part and as crowd,” and reaching for that errant bond in us eclipsed by the rule of individualism and rootedness and the comfort of centers and boundaries.

The CMRC aspires to be an expression of that opening and our seminar seeks to preserve its generous sensibility: relation, repair, abolition, and fierce hope. In that spirit, we propose a reparative decolonial approach to the study of media and religion with a particular emphasis on nationalism since this is the topic of our upcoming conference in January 2024. A decolonial lens is an extension of the deep discussions we had last year around urgency, crisis, repair, abolition, and hope. By interrogating the intellectual, cultural, epistemic, pedagogic, and geographic assumptions we work with in our respective fields, we ask critical questions about the fragility of canons, the instability of knowledge, the inhospitality of mono language, the distressed enmity of empire, the aphasias of colonial innocence, and the enclosures of our spaces of study.

But reparative decoloniality is not only about exposure, response, and denunciation. It is primarily a gentle act of resurgence and movement, a transgressive invitation to a possible future where building new worlds is a pressing priority. The decolonial is not mere intellectual defiance or an insurrection in the conference room. It is a project of radical practice that hastens the end of dominant systems by insisting on other epistemes, other forms, other imaginaries, other archives, other tonalities, and other sovereignties. That is why we propose another orientation this semester not to find something we have lost, but to build something we do not have yet. 

The Seminar

This weekly Seminar is a major component of the research and teaching mission of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture. It brings together faculty, graduate students, and visiting fellows 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

Conference

“Fire on the Mountain Media, Religion, and Nationalism. ” January 10-13 2024. This will be the tenth in a series of successful international conferences held by the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture in Boulder. The previous meetings have brought together an interdisciplinary community of scholars for focused conversations on emerging issues in media and religion. Each has proven to be an important landmark in the development of theory and method in its respective area and has resulted in important collaborations, publications, and resources for further research and dialogue.

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.

CMRC Publication

RHYTHMS: The first issue Rhythms was published in December 2022 and focused on the theme of “writing in times of urgency.” The next issue is planned for May 2023 on "Concepts Under Repair” The prompt for this issue is: what is a concept you are interested in repairing, maintaining, resuscitating, or abolishing for the sake of repairing something else?"

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 write an essay in RHYTHMS. 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. Presentations: fellows are expected to present their work this spring. These presentations could be connected to the publication project: "Concepts in Repair” or they could be about an ongoing research project.

TENTATIVE SCHEDULE & READINGS

Week 1: 1/25 Introductions of Faculty and Fellows
-Discussion of the Theme: Reparative Decoloniality
 

Week 2: 2/1 Decoloniality as Abolition
-Ryan Cecil Jobson (2019). “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn” American Anthropologist 122(2). 259–271.
-Achille Mbembe (2013). “Africa in Theory” a seminar paper presented at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research
 

Week 3: 2/8 Decolonizing the Canon
-Souleymane Bachir Diagne (2013). “On the Postcolonial and the Universal”, Rue Descartes 2 (n° 78), p. 7-18.
-Cornel West (1987). “Minority Discourse and the Pitfalls of Canon Formation,” Yale Journal of Criticism 1, no. 1.
Watch: Raoul Peck’s “Exterminate All the Brutes”
 

Week 4: 2/15 Decolonizing Religious Studies I
-Talal Asad (1993). “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam.
-Tomoko Masuzawa (2005). “Introduction” in The Invention of World Religions, or, How European universalism was preserved in the language of pluralism.

Week 5: 2/22 Decolonizing Religious Studies II
-Mallory Nye (2019). “Decolonizing the Study of Religion”
-Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2020). “Religious Studies and/in the Decolonizing Turn”

Week 6: 3/1 Decolonizing Religious Studies III
- Natalie Avalos (2022). “Taking a Critical and Ethnic Studies Approach to Decolonizing RLST”

-Abdelkader Tayob (2018). “Decolonizing the Study of Religions: Muslim Intellectuals and the Enlightenment Project of Religious Studies,” Journal for the Study of Religion 31, 2 (2018) 7-35.

Week 7: 3/8 Decolonizing Media Studies I
-Stuart Hall “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Race and Racialization: Essential Readings (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2007)

Week 8: 3/15 Decolonizing Media Studies II
-Mohan Dutta and Mahuya Pal (2020). “Theorizing From the Global South: Dismantling, Resisting, and Transforming Communication Theory,” Communication Theory 30: 349–369
-Usha Iyer (2022). “Smuggling, Infiltrating, Usurping: Why Globalizing the Film and Media Studies Curriculum is Essential to Decolonizing It,” The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 61, no.5.

Week 9: 3/22 Decolonizing Media Studies III
-Fatimata Wunpini Mohammed (2022). Bilchiinsi philosophy: Decolonizing methodologies in media studies. Review of Communication, 22(1), 7–24.
-Raka Shome (2019). “Thinking Culture and Cultural Studies—from/of the Global South,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 3: 196–218

Week 10: 4/5 Workshop: RHYTHMS- Concepts Under Repair 

Week 11: 4/12 Decolonial Methodologies
-Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012). “Research Adventures on Indigenous Lands” in Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies : Research and Indigenous Peoples
-Vivetha Thambinathan and Elizabeth Anne Kinsella (2021). “Decolonizing Methodologies in Qualitative Research: Creating Spaces for Transformative Praxis,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods Volume 20: 1–9

Week 12: 4/19 Nationalism, Religion, and Media in a Global Context I
-Sahana Udupa (2019). “Nationalism in the Digital Age: Fun as a Metapractice of Extreme Speech,” International Journal of Communication 13: 3143–3163
-Mark Juergensmeyer (2019). “Religious Nationalism in a Global World,” Religions 10

Week 13: 4/26 Nationalism, Religion, and Media in a Global Context II
-Stuart Davis and Joe Straubhaar, (2020). “Producing Antipetismo: Media activism and the rise of the radical, nationalist right in contemporary Brazil,” The International Communication Gazette, Vol. 82(1) 82–100
Wrap up: Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (1972). “On the Abolition of the English Department,” in Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics 15.

Week 14: 5/3 CMRC End of Semester Lunch