Directly inspired by this year’s Presidential Theme - La Labor de Nuestras Manos or “The Work of Our Hands” - the Graduate Student Committee is hosting paper presentationg that reflect on the topics of reflexivity, scholarship, and the public for our Special Topics Forum. We intend for this forum to be an accessible space for all current graduate students, regardless of their present stage in their academic journeys. Papers consider one or many of the following themes: public scholarship, the scholar’s relationship to their own work, alternate streams of work beyond the traditional tenure-track pipeline, and understudied communities and focuses.
In this paper, I discuss the work of my hands as a woman who studies her own religious community. One of my major challenges was that my community, a minority Muslim sect, has maintained privacy out of fear of religious persecution. In addition, as an initiated member of the community, not only have I undertaken vows to protect sacred knowledges, but I also want to respect the wishes of community members regarding sensitive issues, particularly relating to the women. In response to these concern, I approach my research through social media. My content creation echoed that of my participants and made transparent the aims and potential outcomes of my research: to prioritize participant voices and create knowledge with my participants with an ethics of care and transparency. My public scholarship allowed me to engage and build trust with my participants long before I started my research.
Is our work ever just singular? What is the role, and responsibility, of institutions in shaping the minds of workers who feel their work is mundane and insignificant? What responsibility does the Church have in shaping its doctrine of vocation to show the significance, dignity, and creativity of all work? This paper argues that pre-Civil Rights era social ethicist George Kelsey’s notion of ‘social mission through vocation’ offers a helpful way for workers to think about their work. First, it surveys Kelsey’s critiques of the shortcomings of early-twentieth-century Protestant doctrines of vocation, especially as they relate to urban industrial settings. Next, it considers the Church’s responsibility to redefine the doctrine of vocation to include a sense of mission and communal meaning. Lastly, it explores the ways in which Kelsey’s ‘vocational ethic of social responsibility’ can aid grad students as they navigate academic environments.