Seminar

Problematizing Polycrisis - Fall 2024 Syllabus

Anonymous — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 23:08:53 +0000

Problematizing Polycrisis - Fall 2024 Syllabus Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/04/2024 - 17:08

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.

This is not a statement of property. Land is no property. Land is no territory. Land was meant to be free.

The CMRC Seminar

There are many seminars at the university. Why add one more? What is the point of yet another research gathering? At the dawn of a new academic year, we wonder under what skies we have been called to meet now? Through the years we have come to understand our fellowship beyond the conventional modes of academic assembly. What began as a mere reading group has matured into a community of deep sharing and listening, a forum where we don’t horde knowledge and confer degrees. Our Center has achieved a lot in its short history and we will persist in our commitment to lead research in the study of media and religion, but we wish to deepen the radicalism we have been long cultivating in our praxis, and to explore in new ways how the understanding of global religious and mediatic imaginaries can open doors to liberation, in our community and far beyond.

In this space, we have developed an intimate intellectual community and an approach to academic fellowship with multiple tasks, goals, and styles. Over the years, we have supported each other through personal and political crises, read and edited each other’s work, studied authors that deeply challenged the canons in our fields, and rehearsed work before publications and conference presentations. In fact, we believe now more than ever that before the research grants, the polished publications, and the conference talks, there is first the small, slow, and nonetheless audacious incubation of the seminar space.

Moving forward, we wish to double down on the audacity of our space. We ask you to consider with us a simple yet profound question: what does it mean to hold a seminar in the tumult of our times? What should it mean to think in times of live genocide, of climate catastrophe, and the whatever-it-takes doctrine of a rabid capitalism?

What are you here for? Have you thought about your “presence” in this room?

There is no better time to read, think, and write than when things seem to fray at the edges, when exhaustion overwhelms our resolve, and when cynicism cripples our imagination. Our project, if we have one, is to smuggle will in an age of catastrophism. Yes, Trump might win, fascism is on the rise everywhere, wars are fought by arsonists disguised as prophets of peace, climate destruction is unstoppable, racism and misogyny are as rampant as ever, democracy is a farcical battlefield of so-called divine injunctions, our curricula still feel like we are trespassing into the master’s mansion, and our universities teach social justice in classrooms only to repress students when they take the lessons outdoors.

Yet, we have a duty to begin again and stay the course no matter what. We don’t think and write when it is sunny outside. We are the lucky ones because our toolbox has words and ideas and because the chairs we sit on are little thrones we must exorcize to shake off prize and privilege. We must savor our intellectual encounter and greet it with urgency as if it were to disappear the day after.

There is always this year…

This is not just an empty slogan we hear at the start of a political campaign or a corporate jingle to celebrate our resilience and inexhaustibility. We borrow this phrase from Hanif Abdurraqib, a poet and essayist and author of the brilliant book There Is Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. Abdurraqib’s book is about love, loss, enemies, disruption, baldness, sweetness, reassurance, and choreographies of ascension through small rituals of the everyday.

Speaking about the basketball dunk as a form of glorious ascension, he writes, “Have you ever been in the air so long that your feet begin to fall in love with the new familiar, walking along some invisible surface that is surely there, that must be, as there is no other way to describe what miracle keeps you afloat? How long have you been suspended in a place that loves you with the same ferocity and freedom as the ground might, as the grave might, as a heaven that lets you walk in drowning in gold might?”

The defiance of the dunk as an affront to the limits of the ground is a form of winning when winning is impossible. “There is always this year” is the force of expanding the definition of winning, as Audre Lorde would say, to the point there will be no losing.

What if we engaged our space and practice in this seminar as winning without the cynicism of losing hovering above our heads all the time? What if we thought of our work like the ascension of a dunk? As Toni Morrison says, “Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”

What shit weighs us down in the university? Our flight begins not only by knocking things down, but also by imagining how to build new spaces, new forms of assembly, and new paths to action.

What new seeds do you bring to this seminar? Welcome to the CMRC.

Fall 2024 Seminar Focus

This Fall, the theme of the seminar will be on problematizing polycrisis. The literature on polycrisis provides a theoretical entry point in religion and media studies and the topic connects well to the Center’s research and teaching mission. Polycrisis is also a generative anchor point to discuss all sorts of other political/religious/economic/cultural themes of crisis in the present moment (like the US election, the war in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, etc.).

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

Religion in Emergent Media Spaces: Collective Study and Liberatory Imagination

Starting in 2025, with the support of the Henry Luce Foundation, Religion in Emergent Media Spaces is a three-year project to build infrastructure for media experimentation at the intersection of religion and liberatory social change. The heart of the project is an investment in the weekly seminar of the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Center for Media, Religion, and Culture, already a flourishing convergence of scholars, students, and media practitioners. By opening the door of the seminar to an expanded community, the project will advance it from an eminent academic space to a convergence point for a wider range of participants. These will include prominent thinkers joining us as visiting fellows and media practitioners who will develop innovative media interventions in collaboration with our Center’s early-career researchers. Along the way, the Center will experiment with its own practices of media-making. Taken together, the elements of this project will establish the Center as a site for both incubating impactful media practices around religion and rethinking the basic premises of the academic seminar.

This semester, we will begin planning for the project, including by discussing invitations for potential participants.

CMRC Publication

RHYTHMS: The first issue Rhythms was published in December 2022 and focused on the theme of “writing in times of urgency.” The second issue on "Concepts Under Repair” came out in December 2023. The prompt for that issue was: 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. 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 encouraged to present their work this fall on their research and creative work. These are great opportunities to share your work and get valuable feedback. Check with Nandi Pointer to sign up for a time slot at the beginning of the semester.

Schedule & Readings

Week 1: 9/4
Introductions of Faculty and Fellows; Discussion of this semester’s seminar theme

Week 2: 9/11
Intro to seminar theme: Polycrisis

Adam Tooze, “Welcome to the World of the Polycrisis,” Financial Times, 28 October 2022

Kate Whiting and Hyojin Park, “This Is Why Polycrisis Is a Useful Way of Looking at the World Right Now,” World Economic Forum, 7 March 2023

Week 3: 9/18
Permacrisis

Neil Turnbull, “Permacrisis: What It Means and Why It’s Word of the Year for 2022,” The Conversation, 11 November 2022

Kai Heron, “Capitalist Catastrophism,” Roar Magazine, Issue 10

Week 4: 9/25
Crisis and modernity

Zygmunt Bauman and Carlo Bardoni, State of Crisis (selections)

Week 5: 10/2
Crisis and communication

Timothy Sellnow and Matthew Seeger, Theorizing Crisis Communication, ch 1-2

Week 6: 10/9
Crisis and participatory culture

Henry Jenkins, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism (either first or last chapter)

Mel Monier, “Rest as Resistance:” Black Cyberfeminism, Collective Healing and Liberation on @TheNapMinistry,” Communication, Culture, and Critique 16, no. 3 (2023): 119-125.

Week 7: 10/16
Religion, the secular, and re-enchantment

Charles Taylor, “Disenchantment-Reenchantment”

Optional: “The Art Seminar,” in David Morgan & James Elkins, eds., Re-Enchantment (New York: Routledge, 2008)

Week 8: 10/23
Crisis and democracy

Bayo Akomolafe, "The Children of the Minotaur: Democracy & Belonging at the End of the World," Democracy and Belonging Forum, 7 February 2024

Week 9: 10/30
Crisis, politics, and the body

Giorgio Agamben, Where Are We Now?: The Epidemic as Politics

Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic Is a Portal,” Financial Times, 3 April 2020

Shani Orgad, “Crisis-Ready Responsible Selves: National Productions of the Pandemic,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 16 February 2022

Week 10: 11/6
Crisis and the academy

Sara Ahmed, Introduction: “On Arrival,” in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Duke University Press, 2012)

Maya Binyam, “You Pose a Problem: A Conversation with Sara Ahmed,” The Paris Review, 14 January 2022

Week 11: 11/13
Crisis and the environment/Hell

Timothy Morton, “What the Hell: An Exordium,” Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2014)

Sarah McFarland Taylor, “F*ck Earth: Unmasking Mars Colonization Marketing, from Planetary Perceived Obsolescence to Apocalyptic ‘New Earth’ Rhetoric,” Journal of Religion, Media, and Digital Culture 11, no. 1 (2022): 54-84

Week 12: 11/20
Tsawalk: An Indigenous approach

Umeek / E. Richard Atleo, “Genesis of Global Crisis and a Theory of Tsawalk,” Principles of Tsawalk: An Indigenous Approach to Global Crisis (University of British Columbia Press, 2011)

Week 13: 11/27
No meeting; Fall break

Week 14: 12/4
Time, Pace, and Counter-Media

Byung-Chul Han, chs. 1-4 in The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering (Polity, 2017)

Week 15: 12/11
Cults and Polycrisis; film: Neptune Frost

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A Loophole of Retreat - Spring 2023 Syllabus

Anonymous — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 06:00:00 +0000

A Loophole of Retreat - Spring 2023 Syllabus Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/06/2023 - 00:00

“I may be too thin, but I can still dance.”—Audre Lorde

This is not a statement of property. Land is no property. Land is no territory. Land was meant to be free.

The CMRC Seminar

There are many seminars at the university. Why add one more? What is the point of yet another research gathering? At the dawn of a new academic year, we wonder under what skies

We have been called to meet now? Through the years we have come to understand our fellowship beyond the conventional modes of academic assembly. What began as a mere reading group has matured into a community of deep sharing and listening, a forum where we don’t horde knowledge and confer degrees. Our Center has achieved a lot in its short history and we will persist in our commitment to lead research in the study of media and religion, but we wish to deepen the radicalism we have been long cultivating in our praxis, and to explore in new ways how the understanding of global religious and mediatic imaginaries can open doors to liberation, in our community and far beyond.

Moving forward, we wish to double down on the audacity of our space. We ask you to consider with us a simple yet profound question: what does it mean to hold a seminar in the tumult of our times?

We would like you to imagine this space as a fugitive practice we might describe as "a loophole of retreat." We borrow the phrase from Harriet Jacobs' 1861 memoir where she tells the story

of living in a crawlspace for seven years after she escapes from enslavement. Jacobs describes that crawlspace both as an enclosure and a site for the enactment of practices of freedom. The same phrase was used by black feminist artist Simone Leigh when she exhibited her work at the Guggenheim in 2019 and also when she was asked to represent the United States at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Leigh used sculpture to challenge the conventional uses of space to invoke history and memory. She introduced a new concept she calls, "the creolization of form," a creative and hybrid use of language and form that allowed her to defy the restricted spaces of the crawlspace (the plight of black women) by creating giant sculptures of women whose stories have been left out from the archives.

We are inspired by how deeply decolonial and stunningly uplifting it is to speak of loopholes, retreat, and creolization of form. Our seminar is both a space of hiding and an opening of alternative conspicuousness. We hide to appear differently. There is both absence and presence in the idea of the seminar we seek to practice. We wish for our work to go underground but only to resurface anew. Our loophole of retreat is in fact an invitation to rise up. Who said that the seminar can only be one thing? We wish to preserve this space so that its potential force of incubation can extend beyond the walls of the university. Our work together must be a burst and a trickle. We will read, listen, learn, and get on the road together, but we must also fight to escape the lull of business as usual. We must turn up the ground. We must win!

In our last conference, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, spoke movingly about biidaaban, that very first ray of light in the morning which announces the dawn of another day. As a Nishnaabeg concept, “Biidaaban,” Simpson said, “is this idea that every moment is a collapsing of the future and the past, and what we do now gives birth to that next moment.” That next moment is contingent on how we act in the space of this seminar, on the deep sense of presence we wish to invoke around our table, on the generative refusals we seek to enact with our work, and on the kind of relationships we hope to weave with one another. Our loophole is indeed a biidaaban. Let us begin again¹

Fall Seminar Focus

This Fall we will devote the seminar to reading selected texts written by the plenary speakers in our upcoming conference in January. In the spirit of loopholes and retreats, we hope to cultivate a practice of reading-in-common in preparation of a conference that invites us to be in fellowship creatively and differently. Reading without an aesthetics of community, without a commitment

to the common good is a mere act of mapping the world when this world must be transformed. The Fire on the Mountain Conference summons us against the vulgarity of property embedded in the practices of nation and nationalism but also against the comfort of simply listing the inventory. The poetics of our seminar wants us to read and act in the world to be in real connection with others and figure out how the facility of our thinking and our writing can link up with the tribulations of our global reality. We read work by the speakers in the conference not simply to acknowledge their expertise or recognize their notoriety in the field of media, religion, and nationalism. We read these authors because when we think and write, we think and write with others not as footnotes or potential resources in a reference list but as people from whom we acquire a debt of understanding, translating, and sharing.

Our labor cannot be solitary and conventional because convention ain’t a loophole.

The Plenary Speakers are:

Philip Gorski, Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale University. He writes on religion and politics in early modern and modern Western Europe and North America from a comparative historical perspective. His current work focuses on the history and politics of White

Christian Nationalism and American Civil Religion. He is the co-author of The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy.

Raka Shome, The Harron Family Endowed Chair, and Professor of Communication at Villanova University. She writes on postcolonial cultures, transnational feminism and nationalism as they intersect with media/communication cultures. Her current research interests are in Asian (and non-western) Modernities, Contemporary Indian (Hindu) Nationalism and Gender; the Global South; Transnational Politics of Knowledge Production as a Communication issue. She is the author of Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture. Dr. Shome is currently finishing up a book Cleansing the Nation: Hindu nationalism, Gender and the Clean India campaign (contracted with Duke U Press). She is a Distinguished Scholar of National Communication Association (USA) and an elected fellow of International Communication Association.

Ramesh Srinivasan, Professor of information studies and design media arts at UCLA and Director of UC Digital Cultures Lab. He writes about the intersection of technology, innovation, politics, business, and society. A Bernie Sanders campaign surrogate and author of Beyond the Valley: How Innovators around the World are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow, Srinivasan militates for a democratic Internet and a digital bill of rights around the world.

Reiland Rabaka, Professor of African, African American, and Caribbean Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies and Founding Director of the Center for African and African American Studies at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder. His books include W.E.B. Du Bois and the Disciplinary Decadence of Sociology; The Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism; and Black Power Music! Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement.

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.

You can join our team of organizing volunteers for this event. This is an important occasion to learn how scholarly fellowship is made and to connect with both leading and rising scholars in the fields of media and religion.

Research Projects

Public Religion and Public Scholarship in the Digital Age:

A research project (January 2017 through June 2023) 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

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.

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.
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 Hypermediations, was launched in 2017.
A book volume is forthcoming in fall 2023 entitled, Hypermediations: Essays on Religion, Media, and Crisis, edited by Nabil Echchaibi, Nathan Schneider, Stewart Hoover, 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 present new research while reflecting on the impossible demands that today’s sense of continuing crisis place on the vocation of scholarship.
Podcast Series to be released in fall 2023 with 10 episodes featuring in-depth conversations with each member of the working group.

CMRC Publication

RHYTHMS: The first issue Rhythms was published in December 2022 and focused on the theme of “writing in times of urgency.” The second issue on "Concepts Under Repair” will be out in September. 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

Research Presentations: fellows are expected to present their work this fall on their research. Think about the invitation in this seminar to operate as if we were in a loophole of retreat. What does this description provoke in you and in the way you think about your own work?

Check with Nandi Pointer to sign up for a time slot at the beginning of the semester.

Tentative Schedule and Readings

Week 1: 9/6 Introductions of Faculty and Fellows

-Discussion of the Theme: The Seminar as A Loophole of Retreat

-Fire on the Mountain Conference: organization and volunteering

Week 2: 9/13 White Christian Nationalism I

Readings:

- “Introduction: Eruption” and ““This Is Our Nation, Not Theirs,” in Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy.

Week 3: 9/20 White Christian Nationalism II

Readings:

-“The Spirit of 1690” and “Avoiding “The Big One,” in Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy.

Presentation _______________________

Week 4: 9/27 Nation, Religion, and Gender I

Readings:

-“White Femininity in the Nation, the Nation in White Femininity,” in Raka Shome, Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture

Presentation _______________________

Week 5: 10/4 Nation, Religion, and Gender II

Readings:

- Raka Shome, “The long and deadly road: the covid pandemic and Indian migrants,” Cultural Studies 35:2-3, 319-335.

-Pradip Thomas, “Populism, Religion, and the Media in India,” International Journal of Communication 17 (2023), 2925–2938.

Presentation _______________________

Week 6: 10/11 Visit by Dr. James Hoesterey, Emory University

Associate Professor and Winship Distinguished Research Professor of Religion at Emory. Dr. Hoesterey’s research and teaching interests focus on Islam, media, and politics. His first book, Rebranding Islam: Piety, Prosperity, and a Self-help Guru (Stanford University Press, November 2015), chronicles the rise, fall, and rebranding of celebrity televangelist Kyai Haji Abdullah Gymnastiar. In 2016, Rebranding Islam was awarded Runner-Up for the Clifford Geertz Book Prize awarded by the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. He is currently leading a large research project on diplomacy, soft power, and the making of "moderate Islam" in Egypt, Morocco, and Indonesia (funded by the Henry Luce Foundation's Program on Religion & International Affairs).

Readings: TBA.

Week 7: 10/18 Technology and Transnational Solidarity

Readings:

- “Digital Stories from the Developing World,” in Ramesh Srinivasan, Whose Global Village?: Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World

-“An Internet For Us All,” in Ramesh Srinivasan, Beyond the Valley: How Innovators around the World are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow

Presentation _______________________

Week 8: 10/25

Media, Religion, and Populism

Readings:

- Johanna Sumiala, Stewart M. Hoover, Corrina Laughlin, “Global Populism: Its Roots in Media and Religion| Religious Populism? Rethinking Concepts and Consequences in a Hybrid Media Age—Introduction,” International Journal of Communication 17.

-Bilge Yesil, “Mediating Muslim Victimhood: An Analysis of Religion and Populism in International Communication,” International Journal of Communication 17

Presentation ______________________

Week 9: 11/1

Alternative Frameworks of Nationalist Consciousness: Pan-Africanism

Readings:

- Reiland Rabaka, “Introduction: On the Intellectual elasticity and political plurality of Pan-Africanism,” in Rabaka (Ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism.

- Presentation ______________________

Week 10: 11/8 Alternative Frameworks of Nationalist Consciousness: Black Power Nationalism and Aesthetics

Readings:

-“Introduction Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement” AND “The Black Power Movement, the Black Arts Movement, and the Black Aesthetic,” in Reiland Rabaka, Black Power Music

Presentation _______________________

Week 11: 11/15 Alternative Frameworks of Nationalist Consciousness

Readings:

-Benjamin Neuberger, “Black Zionism: The Return to Africa in Theory and Practice,” in African Nationalism.

-Camilla Hawthorne, “Black matters are spatial matters: Black geographies for the twenty-first century,” Geography Compass 13(11).

Presentation _______________________

Week 12: 11/22 THANKSGIVING

Week 13: 11/29 Workshop

Week 14: 12/6 Workshop

Week 15: 12/13 CMRC End of Semester Lunch

1 This is not a footnote. It is a gift. The phrase refers to an evocative poem by Major Jackson entitled: “Let Me Begin Again”.

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On Reparative Decoloniality - Spring 2023 Syllabus

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 07:00:00 +0000

On Reparative Decoloniality - Spring 2023 Syllabus Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/17/2023 - 00:00

On Reparative Decoloniality

Spring 2023 Seminar

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

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:

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 Hypermediations, 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” https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/4580/
-Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2020). “Religious Studies and/in the Decolonizing Turn” https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/decoloniality/religiousstudiesd
ecolonialturn/

Week 6: 3/1 Decolonizing Religious Studies III
- Natalie Avalos (2022). “Taking a Critical and Ethnic Studies Approach to Decolonizing RLST”
https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/decoloniality/critical-indigenousapproach/
-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

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Repair, Abolish, Hope - Fall 2022 Syllabus

Anonymous — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 06:00:00 +0000

Repair, Abolish, Hope - Fall 2022 Syllabus Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/15/2022 - 00:00

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

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

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Spring 2022 Seminar

Anonymous — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Spring 2022 Seminar Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 01/10/2022 - 00:00

Spring 2022 Seminar

Let’s face it, the roof is on fire, but our hoses boast only trickles of water. We didn’t have to wait for the crisis of today, or the crisis of last year, or that of ten years ago to feel the alarm in our veins, to realize we stand at the edge of a cliff, or to grasp the necessity to change course. An overemphasis on the unique inflictions of our moment will not help us. Crises come and never go. They fall out of view or mutate like the virus confronting us now. In the midst of a perpetual catalog of terror, greed, rage, and bodies still needing to matter, have you paused to ask what is the point of our work, the orientation of our words, and the cost of our jargon? Others worried before us about the predicaments of their time and faced similar challenges about the echo of their labor.

But our problem is not only one of communication and reach. A deeper concern we face has to do with the place of our thinking amidst today’s avalanche of information and expertise, a dizzying speed of data circulation, and changing perceptions of the value of knowledge. IT companies spin endless tales about progress and perfection induced by an endless flow of data; politicians dangerously blur the lines between information and facts; and universities insist they are today’s last refuge from this assault against knowledge.

Where are you?

Amidst these grand statements, slogans, and the new vulnerabilities of knowledge, where are you? Have you thought about why you are here? Do you feel the tension between the urgency of our times and the inaudibility of our thinking? Have you come to terms with what the University has done to us? Has the harshness of this world exhausted you or does it animate you? What injuries does your writing carry? What crises turn up in your work? And what agents of hope do you seek to soften the anxieties of our time?

Notice that it is not a mere reaction we ask of you, nor do we expect an easy or definitive answer to these questions. We raise these grinding questions because curiously in our journey coursing through the university nobody confronts us with these unnamed feelings, these internal struggles condemned by academic rationalities as esoteric and distracting. What if we opened up this semester as a collective to these sentiments of rage, vulnerability, confusion, loss, solidarity, audacity, patience, and hope? What if we initiated a conversation to embrace these feelings and reflect on how they show up or are silenced in our writing and our reading? I long for a space of study where we can explore the full potential of our beings beyond the normative containers in which we are summoned as writers, readers, teachers, and scholars and beyond the unrealistic idioms of unwavering strength and persistent confidence? What if the seminar table that binds us together each week served another purpose of our fellowship? It is precisely this injunction to find each other in and outside the halls of the university, to foster new solidarities, and locate common resonances that is the sense of urgency we need under duress. The power of coalition and the realization that the urgency of the times come from the moment, as Fred Moten says, we all realize that the situation is “fucked up” for everyone and that others don’t need our help as much as they need our conviction that deprivation is killing us all.

In a sermon he delivered at the Trinity Church in New York City, Moten (2020) reminded congregants of the meaning of fellowship and “why we come together”. In recounting a personal story of how a community in his native Arkansas gathered one day to the surprise of his mother to complete the work on his deceased grandfather’s garden, Moten emphasized the true value of collecting and responding to the call as communities working together not only to overturn the soil and help a family cope with its grief, but to overturn the order of a turbulent world. He says: “…maybe we can begin again deeply to consider what it is to have been called, what it is to have been or be collected, gathered… The readings call upon us to take note of that and not only to wonder at it and be thankful for it, but also to consider what forms call and response must take for us now that the world is drowning and burning, freezing and melting, starving and engorging itself all at once.”

Why Are You Here?

I have come to hate the word ‘research’ for similar reasons. It is too wooden, technical, distant, and too much tainted with convention and privilege. I hate how it sounds when its radical promise is corrupted by the insular bureaucracies of hiring, tenure and promotion and the brutal demands of funding and relevance. Don Byrd said that “poetry was once created in resistance against the alphabet as a medium that had become dangerously fluent.” Research, both the word and the practice, needs a poetic intervention because its fluency robs us of our ability to find harmony in a discordant world, to remain in touch, to be present in the moment so we can labor together and find one another. Like Audre Lorde’s caution that poetry is not a luxury, research should not feel like a luxury either, a kind of high-minded game we play for our intellectual satisfaction. The books we read and write are not meant to be counted, folded, and shelved. Our ideas, our words must live beyond the shadow of an administered view of academia. They must rise and keep rising to hum along with the tune of the world. “Poetry,” Lorde says, “is the way we give name to the nameless so it can be thought…our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas.” Is our work carved from the same energy, the same profound orientation?

What are you reading and writing?

One of our fellows recently asked in a final course project about decolonial pedagogy this most amazing question “can a syllabus hum?” What she meant was whether we “can design a syllabus that has sonic texture”. This makes me think about humming as a Lordean opening of other experiences of learning, of studying together, a kind of epistemic disobedience against a standardized and overly fluent syllabus of scholarly and pedagogical production. What should our syllabi sound like then? Does your writing produce a sound? What do you sound like? What sounds does this moment require of us?

You see, the problem we face is not a mere deficiency of publicness in our work but a serious lack of self-reflexivity about our own praxis. I propose a rebel’s approach, a hacker’s sensibility to our seminar this semester because we all have a debt to each other and to the world around us, a debt, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney say, without the burden of credit, “without count, without interest, without repayment.” That is a debt lived and shared through the insurgent hospitality of study, the improvisation of thought that does not cohere, and the imagination of action that is unburdened by logisticality.

This perhaps is not a provocation as much as it is an invitation to think, study, write, read, curate, feel, pause, and act in harmony in times deemed urgent. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” is not a slogan. It was June Jordan’s salute to the bravery of women in South Africa and their resistance during the dark times of Apartheid. What I retain from it for us is its injunction to heal ourselves as a liberatory practice, its call to trust the tools we have not only to indict the world but to change it for the better. Perhaps the frame of urgency is overdetermined. Maybe injury and defiance are too accentuated as an entry point into study. Maybe the loudness of the world has turned publicness into a tyrannical necessity. We may need to re-center other qualities and habits of being like the ordinary, the quiet, the silent, the shy, the reserved, the incomplete without naïvely muting the hold violence exerts on our existence everyday.

Let us rehearse this form of fellowship together…

Description

Spring Seminar Focus

This spring we will focus on these themes: crisis, urgency, resistance, resilience, and governance in relation to our research, teaching, and writing practices. We will also discuss our ongoing hypermediations project and seek input from the Center’s fellows in the form of peer-reviewed reflections to be published in our project’s website and in a new publication printed by the CMRC.

Center Projects

Public Religion and Public Scholarship in the Digital Age:

Major Activities under the Grant:

Expectations

Fellows are encouraged to get involved in TWO 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/workshop their Hypermediations reflection essay. We will circulate a sign-up sheet in our second meeting of the semester. You can also take the lead on developing collaborative conference proposals/panels and workshops on behalf of the Center on pedagogical, research, or career questions. 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 - 1/19 Introductions of Faculty and Fellows. Description of Hypermediations Project
Readings:
-Provocation/Invitation

Week 2 - 1/26 Readings:
-Hypermediation Essay and Book Proposal

Week 3: 2/9 Readings: What do you come to theory for?
-bell hooks, “Theory as liberatory practice,” in Teaching to Transgress.
-“Cornel West Interviewed by bell hooks,” in Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life

Week 4: 2/16 Readings: On Study
-“The General Antagonism: An Interview with Stevphen Shukaitis, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten,” in Harney and Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.
-Robin D.G. Kelley, (2016). ”Black Study, Black Struggle: The university is not an engine of social transformation. Activism is,” https://bostonreview.net/forum/robin-d-g-kelley-black-study-blackstruggle

Week 5: 2/23 Readings: On Writing
-Jean Paul Sartre, (1949). “Why Write?” in Sartre, What Is Literature?
-Watch: “Looking for Language in the Ruins” JJJJJerome Ellis, Saidiya Hartman, and Erica Hunt

Week 6: 3/2 Readings: On Religion and Urgency
-Read through the website, “What is Uncivil Religion?” A Collaborative Digital Project Between the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Week 7: 3/9 Readings: On the Affective and Aesthetic Condition of our Moment
-Read “Introduction”; “Alan Kurdi’s Body on the Shore”; “ “Melting into Visibility”; “Unwatched/Unmanned: Drone Strikes and the Aesthetics of the Unseen,” in Unwatchable.

Week 8: 3/16 Readings: On Resistance, Quiet, and Silence
-Kevin Quashie, (2012). “Publicness, Silence, and the Sovereignty of the Interior,” in Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture”

Week 9: 3/23 Spring Break

Week 10: 3/30 Readings: On Resilience
-Cynthia Dillard, (2019). “To experience joy: musings on endarkened feminisms, friendship, and scholarship,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. 32(2).

Week 11: 4/6 Readings: On Trauma and Victimhood
-Lili Chouliaraki, (2021). “Victimhood: The affective politics of vulnerability,” European Journal of Cultural Studies, 24(1) 10–27
-Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “The Unwatchable and the Unwatchable”

Week 12: 4/13 Readings: On Courage, Hope, and Fear
-James Baldwin: An Open Letter to My Sister Angela Y. Davis
-Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Anyone Living in a Colonial Society Can Relate to Black Lives Matter
-Rebecca Solnit, Excerpts from Orwell’s Roses

Week 13: 4/20 Readings: On Global Commons and Collective Governance
-Federica Carugati and Nathan Schneider, “Governance Archeology: Research as Political Ancestry”

Week 14: 4/27 Readings: TBA

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Problematizing Polycrisis - Fall 2024 Syllabus

The CMRC Seminar

Fall 2024 Seminar Focus

Center Projects

Religion in Emergent Media Spaces: Collective Study and Liberatory Imagination

CMRC Publication

Expectations

Schedule & Readings

Week 1: 9/4 Introductions of Faculty and Fellows; Discussion of this semester’s seminar theme

Week 2: 9/11 Intro to seminar theme: Polycrisis

Week 3: 9/18 Permacrisis

Week 4: 9/25 Crisis and modernity

Week 5: 10/2 Crisis and communication

Week 6: 10/9 Crisis and participatory culture

Week 7: 10/16 Religion, the secular, and re-enchantment

Week 8: 10/23 Crisis and democracy

Week 9: 10/30 Crisis, politics, and the body

Week 10: 11/6 Crisis and the academy

Week 11: 11/13 Crisis and the environment/Hell

Week 12: 11/20 Tsawalk: An Indigenous approach

Week 13: 11/27 No meeting; Fall break

Week 14: 12/4 Time, Pace, and Counter-Media

Week 15: 12/11 Cults and Polycrisis; film: Neptune Frost

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A Loophole of Retreat - Spring 2023 Syllabus

The CMRC Seminar

Fall Seminar Focus

Center Projects

Conference

Research Projects

CMRC Publication

Expectations

Tentative Schedule and Readings

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On Reparative Decoloniality - Spring 2023 Syllabus

On Reparative Decoloniality

Spring 2023 Seminar

Spring Seminar Focus

The Seminar

Center Projects

Conference

Center Projects

Public Religion and Public Scholarship in the Digital Age:

CMRC Publication

Expectations

TENTATIVE SCHEDULE & READINGS

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Repair, Abolish, Hope - Fall 2022 Syllabus

Repair, Abolish, Hope

Fall 2022 Seminar

Description

Center Projects

Public Religion and Public Scholarship in the Digital Age:

Expectations

SCHEDULE & READINGS

Off

Spring 2022 Seminar

Spring 2022 Seminar

Description

Spring Seminar Focus

Center Projects

Public Religion and Public Scholarship in the Digital Age:

Expectations

SCHEDULE & READINGS

Off

Week 1: 9/4
Introductions of Faculty and Fellows; Discussion of this semester’s seminar theme

Week 2: 9/11
Intro to seminar theme: Polycrisis

Week 3: 9/18
Permacrisis

Week 4: 9/25
Crisis and modernity

Week 5: 10/2
Crisis and communication

Week 6: 10/9
Crisis and participatory culture

Week 7: 10/16
Religion, the secular, and re-enchantment

Week 8: 10/23
Crisis and democracy

Week 9: 10/30
Crisis, politics, and the body

Week 10: 11/6
Crisis and the academy

Week 11: 11/13
Crisis and the environment/Hell

Week 12: 11/20
Tsawalk: An Indigenous approach

Week 13: 11/27
No meeting; Fall break

Week 14: 12/4
Time, Pace, and Counter-Media

Week 15: 12/11
Cults and Polycrisis; film: Neptune Frost