Constructing Religious Infrastructures and Architectures Roundtable

This roundtable considers religion as an infrastructural project. Infrastructures constitute the media that organize everyday life and the physical objects and technologies that make up our world. The participants in this panel discuss the various ways religions materialize as the nebulous architectures and formal networks that create urban landscapes and are created, in turn, by the spaces they inhabit. Religion, as an infrastructural project, materially and imaginatively organizes labor, land, borders, and bodies—both human and nonhuman. Within cities, suburban, exurban, and rural landscapes, religious infrastructures function simultaneously as unarticulated apparatuses of power and modes of liberatory transformation through technologies of solidarity and mutuality. Thinking through religious infrastructure’s work in solidifying and disrupting racialized capitalism and the extractive ontologies of colonialism, the roundtable panelists will each present a case study from their work. The roundtable will then open up to a larger discussion between participants and the audience.