AAR Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion Group
November 21-25, 2014, San Diego, CA – AAR
The CTDR Group offers an interdisciplinary and international forum for analytical scholars of religion to engage the intersection of critical theory and methodology with a focus on concrete ethnographic and historical case studies. Critical theory draws on methods employed in the fields of sociology, anthropology, history, literary criticism, and political theory in order to bring into scrutiny all kinds of discourses on religion, spanning from academic to nonacademic and from religious to nonreligious.
CTDR is sponsoring or co-sponsoring six sessions at the San Diego AAR with a workshop on the role of comparison in research on religion and panels on violence and alterity, Foucault, The Frankfurt School, French Feminisms and a re-examination of key terms in the study of religion.
CTDR’s Program with abstracts for the Annual Meeting is available for download as a PDF. (recommended for smart phones)
SORAAAD
Friday, November 21, 2014
Comparison and the Analytical Study of Religion Program PDF
Location disclosed to those registered. To register place “SORAAAD – 2014 – Registration” in the subject line of an email addressed to [email protected].
A22-222 Religion and Constructions of Violent Alterity
Saturday – 1:00 PM-3:30 PM
Hilton Bayfront-Indigo B
Co-Sponsored by the Comparative Approaches to Religion and Violence Group
Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion Group
This panel explores the ways that religious discourse may promote the conceptualization of alterity and, in some instances, how that discourse may be a catalyst for violence. Papers rely on methods such as textual analysis, ethnography, and statistics, and draw examples from Biblical, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, and Hindu traditions.
Jamel Velji, Haverford College, Presiding
Margo Kitts, Hawaii Pacific University, Responding
Chipamong Chowdhury, University of Toronto
Genocidal Violence, Conflict, and Communalism: Anti-Buddhist Violence in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (Bangladesh)
Nathan French, Miami University
An American Takfīr? Jihādī-Salafism, the US Drone Campaign, and the Implications of a Comparative Negotiation of Permissible Violence
Ipsita Chatterjea, Vanderbilt University
Durkheim’s Dual Stream Violence Hypothesis and Communal Violence
Sean McCloud, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Fighting Demons in the United States: Third Wave Spiritual Warfare and the Construction of the Non-Evangelical Other
Brian Doak, George Fox University
Monster Violence in the Book of Job as Moral Disorientation and Reorientation
A22-302 Applying Foucault
Saturday – 4:00 PM-6:00 PM
Convention Center-5A
Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion Group, Business Meeting 5:50
Thirty years after his death, what is Foucault’s lasting impact on the study of social order and power? How does Foucault’s work inform analyses of the intersections of religion and the social, political, and cultural? And how might we (continue to) think differently? The papers in this session take up key Foucauldian texts, themes, and theories in conversation with specific empirical data and case studies. Topics include: confession rituals, genetic science, and memorials at Newtown, CT.
Kati Curts, Yale University, Presiding
Ann M. Burlein, Hofstra University, Responding
Daniel Moseson, Syracuse University
Foucault, Science, and Power after Thirty Years
Benjamin Fong, University of Chicago
To Judge and To Be Judged: Michel Foucault on Confession
M. Gail Hamner, Syracuse University
Foucault, Kant, and the Affective Reception of Dramatic Discourse
Business Meeting:
William E. Arnal, University of Regina
David Walker, University of California, Santa Barbara
A23-219 The Frankfurt School: Foundations and Fixations
Sunday – 1:00 PM-2:30 PM
Convention Center-28C
Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion Group
In a session that re-examines the foundations of critical theory and explores it’s contemporary uses, one paper looks at the ways in which Weberian theory was used – selectively – by members of the Frankfurt School; while another looks at the ways in which Habermasian theory uses the Frankfurt School: again, selectively. The two other papers explore relations between Adorno and Benjamin, and between Benjamin and Agamben.
Katja Rakow, Heidelberg University, Presiding
Devin Singh, Yale University, Responding
Joel Harrison, Northwestern University
Routinization, Rationalization, Renunciation: Weber’s Account of Christian Asceticism and its Relation to the History of Critical Theory
Agata Bielik-Robson, University of Nottingham
“Pulling the Brake”: Benjamin, Agamben, and the Anti-Progressive Messianism
Bryan Wagoner, Davis & Elkins College
The “Imaginary Witness”: Adorno’s Inverse Theology
Matt Sheedy, University of Manitoba
Discourses on “Postsecularism” in the Web of the Religion/Secular Binary
A24-209 Feminism and Subjectivity in the Study of Religion
Monday – 1:00 PM-3:30 PM
Convention Center-9
Co-sponsored by Sociology of Religion Group,
Critical Theories and Discourses on Religion Group and
Cultural History of the Study of Religion Group,
or STAR (the Social Theory and Religion Cluster).
STAR Business Meeting, 3:20 pm
2014 marks the thirty- and forty-year anniversaries of key works in French social theory, including Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language (40th anniversary) and Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman (40th) and An Ethics of Sexual Difference (30th). In honor of their legacies, the panelists in this session explore related questions of feminism and subjectivity in the study of religion. With reference not only to Irigaray and Kristeva, but also to Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, they treat critical turns in affect theory and speech act theory, the ethics of alterity, and the discursive formation of subjectivity as a crucial category in the study of religion.
Morny Joy, University of Calgary, Respondent
Abigail Kluchin, Ursinus College
An Alternative Lineage for Affect Theory: Returning to Irigaray’s Speculum de l’Autre Femme and Kristeva’s Revolution du Langage Poétique
Wesley Barker, Mercer University
Signifying Flesh: The Ambiguity of Desire and the Possibility of Alterity in Irigaray’s Ethics of Sexual Difference
Samantha Langsdale, University of London
Framing Historical Women’s Agency: A Critical Reading of Speech Act Theories
Constance Furey, Indiana University
Hermeneutics of Intersubjectivity: Foucault, Butler, and Limit Experiences
Business Meeting:
William E. Arnal, University of Regina;
Randall Styers, University of North Carolina;
Ipsita Chatterjea, Vanderbilt University
A25-120 Key Concepts in the Study of Religion
Tuesday – 9:00 AM-11:30 AM
Convention Center-22
The panelists in this session explore the discursive formation of key concepts in the study of religion, as well as the historiographic legacy of genealogical methods themselves. Under consideration are: human ‘agency’; ancient ‘magic’; American ‘secularism’ and ‘humanism’; and Beninese ‘religion.’ Not content merely to condemn these categories on account of labored or confused applications, the authors here explore also the possibilities of disciplined reclamation.
David Walker, University of California, Santa Barbara, Presiding
Jason C. Bivins, North Carolina State University, Responding
Shaily Patel, University of North Carolina
Many Marvels: Variations of Magical Discourse in Early Christian Traditions
Joseph Blankholm, Columbia University
The Interwoven Genealogies of Secularism and Humanism
Sonia Hazard, Duke University
The Construction of Agency as a Category in the Study of Religion
Elana Jefferson, Emory University
“Religion” and the Politics of Materiality: Confronting Immaterial Religion through Reflections on Vodoun Materialist Orientations
