Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

This presentation analyzes discourses on veiling among Catholic women online as an example of new ways in which practices of the self have been shaped by digital hyperconnectivity. While on the surface, the veil is meant to hearken back to eras past – to combat modernity with tradition – the social media posts about veiling reveal how ideas of tradition are mobilized to negotiate a key tension surrounding self-making in late modernity: the reflexive, neoliberal sovereign self versus an emerging post-neoliberal self, determined through algorithmic individuation. Focusing on discourses of (1) choice and empowerment and (2) trust in the algorithm in #veiling posts on TikTok and Twitter, I argue that interpreting artificial intelligence through a theistic lens helps people articulate, understand, and legitimate the emerging shift from a self-reflexive individual practice to an algorithmically driven process. 

African culture has been largely described as communitarian, and digital media widely accused of threatening that structure. Within scholarship, there are new attempts to understand how the disruption occurs and what new structures might be emerging. Some suggest utter destruction and displacement by Western individualism. Others diagnose or prescribe a return to communitarian models like Ubuntu. Still others suggest a new sociality undergirded by the “network.” Using multimodal discourse analysis of three instances of online Christian meme-type content, I show that digital religion, as practiced online, resists such easy categorizations and extensions. Digital religion scholarship should pay attention to the lived online religious expressions of digitally active Christians for answers, as these non-institutional actors may hold part of the solution to what new cultures are emerging today. And that answer, I suggest, may be that the inability to neatly circumscribe modes of being may be nothing new after all.

Through a multi-media presentation that draws on digital ethnographic research and discourse analysis of podcasts, video streams, and social media, we highlight the relationship between digital apocalypticism and traditionalists’ hopes for an analogue future. By digital apocalypticism, we are referring to the religious anxieties that Reactive Orthodox have about AI, digital surveillance, and transhumanism, and their use of the digital to connect, network, and craft an analogue future offline at the end of the digital world. Digital apocalypticism is linked to the ideological techne of futurecraft. Drawing on the work of architectural theorists Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel, we extend their concept of futurecraft to think beyond the built design of cities to digital media worlds, often the preferred gathering spaces of far/alt-right ideologues. In doing so, we demonstrate that the philosophies moving online are aimed at digital deconstruction to build tangible futures offline, what we call trad futurisms.

Scholars of religion have noted the ways religious and political ideas interact and circulate within memetic communication (Campbell, 2018). There is little research on how African American religious humor, virtual death rituals, and mourning memes have provided a site for the contestation and negotiation of a digital apocalypse. Although ​#RIPBlackTwitter and #twitterhomegoingservice do not register as an explicit sociopolitical critique, they indict Elon Musk’s geeky hypermasculine takeover of Twitter by simultaneously ‘celebrating’ Twitter’s homegoing and attending Black Twitter's own living wake one week after Musk’s arrival at Twitter’s headquarters.  I argue that the hashtags should be seen as representative of creative online performances of irreverent religious protest and that mourning memes in this case are signifying displays of U.S. Afro-Protestants' repertoire of humor on irreverent religious participation. 

As a means of examining the gap between my personal experience loving someone who is “schizophrenic” and the ways that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use the term, I propose an academic “date” with Deleuze, and (when he tags along) also Guattari. In the months to come, I will read Deleuze's philosophical works, as many as I can, including those he wrote with Guattari. My hope is to see if a deeper understanding of his approach helps soothe my visceral response. I’ll learn about both men's careers as psychoanalysts. As I read, I will write freely in response, weaving in aspects of my own experience as a caretaker, a mother, a feminist, and a scholar of religion. My approach will be fragmentary and highly personalized. It might stray into the poetic. It will almost certainly involve tears, which may or may not be written into the text that emerges.

This presentation explores single motherhood as a threat to academic labor and institutional “good citizenry.” Using autotheory, I discuss what it feels like to be that which burdens the proper-time of the institution because of the crip-time of care work. Questions explored include: what exhausted labor reveals about the ideologies of academia; what crip theories look like from the standpoint of a caretaker of the ill and the traumatized; how experiences of exhaustion in those of us whose bodies have flowed more easily through academic spaces might ingender a deeper solidarity with those historically marginalized in academia; how my concepts of agamaphobia–the fear of singleness–and a hermeneutic of the indignantly undignified can offer inroads into the democratization of care and the cripping of academic labor; and how forced transitions from “highly productive” academics to bad institutional citizens call us to reject citizenship in favor of collective care. 

Since I began my sabbatical two and a half months ago, I have suffered from a persistent viral infection that blurs the vision in my right eye. Reading on a screen often  triggers migraine headaches. Anti-virals, eye drops, and high-dose prednisone tablets are just beginning to bring the infection under control. But with nearly 70 precious days of leave already gone, I am exhausted from doing battle with a dormant virus my ophthamologist says is typically activated by stress and exhaustion. How am I supposed to write creative papers suitable for peer-reviewed journals when I can barely keep my eyes open? Reflecting on the relationship between literal and creative blurred vision has come to be part of my coping strategy. I also ponder the relationships among stress, anxiety, illness, and creativity, particularly in light of unequal and gendered institutional expectations.

This paper makes use of deeply personal social media posts and psychoanalytic theory to explore the experiences of and conditions of academic life in recent years. It particular, it explores the possibility and limits of maternal subjectivity in relation to disability and life as an academic mother. By staging this dialogue between forms, the papers asks if dominant theories of academic and maternal subjectivity can account for a mother-child relation that is irreducible to normative accounts of academic agency and psychoanalytic theories of self.

Drawing on the author’s personal experience with an under-studied chronic illness and memoirs by disabled authors, this paper argues that affect theorists have inadequately addressed the relationship between biology and society in their conceptions of disability. At the center of this discussion is a critique of the ways scholars of affect and disability have perpetuated binaries between the social and the biological and between the scientific and the emotional, even while trying to disrupt them. Through examples of the compounded uncertainty and fatigue of searching for a diagnosis, as well as those of the pleasure of developing scientific knowledge about one's own body, the paper argues that the persistence of these binaries not only reinforces the barriers disabled people face, but also prevents scholars from fully capturing the ways that bodies and their worlds, science and emotion, and biology and culture are intimately intertwined.

In this paper, I will define “brooding” as a form of creative resistance in response to the debilitating effects of racial battle fatigue and anti-Blackness. Drawing inspiration from Howard Thurman’s use of the term “brooding” to refer to a mothering Spirit,[1] Lucille Clifton’s poem “night vision,” and Catherine Keller’s embrace of creatio ex profundis I will trace the relationship between rest and creativity in connection with the affective of brooding. I argue that brooding, as a form of (at)tending, necessitates a contemplative resistance and attentive care towards “the work our souls must have.”[2]

[1] Thurman, Meditations of the Heart, 84.

[2] From the title of Emilie Townes’ chapter entitled “Ethics as an Art of Doing the Work Our Souls Must Have,” found in Katie Geneva Cannon, Emilie Maureen Townes, and Angela D. Sims, Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader (Presbyterian Publishing Corp, 2011), 35–50.

This paper is unconventional in that it addresses the affective dimensions of anxiety and exhaustion in academia through the language best suited to do so: poetry. Drawing on journal entries and anecdotes from teaching religious studies to college freshman in the classroom, as well as work on the phenomenologyof affect and the promise of happiness (Ahmed), I explore the affective contours of living under constant pressure in my visiting professorship: "publish or perish;" dealing with ChatGPT; post-pandemic pedagogies and porous classrooms; emotional office hours; compassion fatigue; all at an institution, like many others, with an uncertain financial future. It seems I have two opposing voices in my head: one that reminds of how anxious and tired I feel, and the other that encourages me to keep teaching.

We live in a time of incessant distractions; it is becoming increasingly difficult to practice the discipline required for the sustained, critical inquiry that scholarship demands. Or does it? What new modes of inquiry might arise if we learned from distractions, if we allowed our thinking to be shaped by them? What could we learn from scholars who are more susceptible to distraction than others? How might scholars of religion learn from and make space for the intense and wild creativities of people with ADHD, and embrace the creative possibilities that our “interest-based nervous systems” and “compulsions” open up? What can we learn from our distractions? I will consider the experience of being distracted in the context of knowledge production, teaching, and learning as a form of queer and crip failure to conform. Neurodivergent experiences of distraction might resonate with theories of liberatory pedagogy to challenge neuro-normative assumptions about attention, animacy, and the social nature of thinking and learning. 

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The French orientalist Henry Corbin’s (1903-1978) critique of “historicism” has proven polarizing not only among scholars of Islam but also in broader discussions about the place of phenomenological methods in the study of religion. Both critics and defenders of Corbin, however, assume that he made a singular argument against historicism that clearly differentiated his method from that of his historicist colleagues. By contrast, I argue that Corbin developed at least two arguments against what he termed “historicism:” a moderate anti-reductionist argument and a radical argument that questions the very value of historical research. While these arguments are logically independent, Corbin’s text-critical and exegetical writings appeal to material historical processes and contexts to analyze the texts he is studying. In this regard, Corbin’s own work shows the practical limitations of his radical argument while pointing to a middle ground between reductionist and phenomenological approaches.

The publication of Ephrem’s works at Rome from 1732-1746 marks a watershed in European Ephrem scholarship as the first major printing of his Syriac works. These editions, however, were not only foundational through the texts they provided, by also through their new framing of Ephrem as an author from the East. In their prefaces the editors depict Ephrem not merely as an ancient authority, but as a specifically “oriental” one, coming from and belonging to a context distinguished from the Latin west. This new oriental Ephrem emerges from a transformation of early modern approaches to ancient Christian texts (polemical appeal to Patristic authority, charting of liturgical difference) into a way of seeing the world as divided into East and West. Likewise, the relocation of "oriental" manuscripts to the Roman metropole to produce European printed editions to be exported back to the East reproduces in scholarship the patterns of European colonialism.

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