Joint projects (2023-2024)
Ambedkar’s Religion: A Symposium on Political Theology, Democracy, and Empire
Principal Investigator: Anupama Rao (Barnard College/Columbia University, History and MESAAS)
The primary aim of this workshop is to draw on ongoing primary research in understudied archives in North America, and at Columbia and Harvard in particular, as the spine around which to better contextualize the 1956 Buddhist conversion of Dalit leader and Columbia’s native son, B. R. Ambedkar through inquiries into the longer-term trajectories of Dalit religiosity, debates about caste and Hinduism, and the disciplinary formation of comparative religion and cultural anthropology as these together enabled the rediscovery of Buddhism in India. In brief, the project seeks to provide historical depth and conceptual clarity to answer the question “why Buddhism,” and to better understand the experimental nature of Ambedkar’s Navayana [new vehicle] Buddhism. It does so by bringing together a group of interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners who will approach the issue in two ways: 1) addressing Ambedkar’s conversion as a critical event that requires a far deeper understanding of regional and historical debates about Hinduism and Buddhism in India, and 2) by thinking about the relationship of religion, democracy, and empire as these were repurposed at the moment of decolonization. An edited volume is planned, and participants in the symposium will workshop their papers in anticipation of publication.
Black Religious Liberty Curriculum
Principal Investigators: Elizabeth Reiner Platt (Law, Rights, and Religion Project at Columbia Law School), Katherine Franke (Law, Rights, and Religion Project at Columbia Law School), Kelly Brown Douglas (Episcopal Divinity School)
Despite an increasingly diverse and religiously pluralistic society, the public discourse on “religious liberty” and the most notable religious liberty legal cases of the past decade have focused narrowly on the beliefs and practices of conservative white Christians. Relatedly, religion law today is an overwhelmingly white-dominated field, with public conferences and panels on free exercise rights and church-state separation routinely featuring no or few speakers of color. This is particularly troubling given the powerful impact religion law has on a sweeping range of critical issues including civil rights, access to healthcare, and education, and the important role that religion plays in many communities of color. In order to expand and diversify the public conversation on religious freedom, and with the ultimate aim of encouraging a more pluralistic approach to religious liberty rights, the Law, Rights, and Religion Project at Columbia Law School (LRRP) and Union Theological Seminary (UTS) will organize a free, virtual course on “Black Religious Liberty.” The course will explore the history of religious liberty in the U.S. as well as contemporary issues in religion law with a focus on the ways in which religious freedom has protected—or failed to protect—Black Americans. Covering topics ranging from colonial laws stating that “baptisme of slaves doth not exempt them from bondage,” to the suppression of African and Caribbean religious practices, to Free Exercise challenges to civil rights laws, to cases parsing the difference between religious and political beliefs in new religious movements like MOVE and the Nation of Islam, this course will teach religion law from a perspective too often ignored in the academic and popular discourse. The primary audience for this course will include law students, legal academics and practitioners, historians, religious studies scholars, and theologians. You can view the curriculum and learn more about the project here.
Ethnographies of African Work Worlds
Principal Investigators: Brian Larkin (Barnard College/Columbia University, Anthropology), Mamadou Diouf (Columbia University, Institute of African Studies)
Ethnographies of African Work Worlds is a year-long conversation that brings together scholars from the United States, France, and Africa to examine the changing nature of work and labor in contemporary Africa. Work and labor are not just crucial topics in African studies. They are the topics around which African studies has been constructed and organized. However, ‘work’ itself is not a stable category, but it has continually been redefined through colonial and postcolonial African history. Recent years have seen the emergence of a spate of new forms of work – in cultural industries, digital start-ups, religious movements, migrant infrastructures – which straddle the conceptual divide between work and non-work. At the same time, precarious forms of work or what might be designated as non-work continue to expand in number. In a two-part workshop series, we seek to bring scholars together to: A) understand emerging forms of work that do not quite fit into existing conceptual categories and B) re-examine how scholars, intellectuals and policy makers analytically conceive of work and its operations in contemporary Africa. The workshops further the mission of the IRCPL by charting a new research agenda that emphasizes the work and labor that underlines cultural, political, intellectual, and religious movements previously obscured in the scholarly literature.
Filipino American Nurses: Faith and Professional Communities in the Age of COVID and Anti-Asian Hate
Principal Investigators: Christian Gloria (Mailman School of Public Health), Aprilfaye Manalang (Norfolk State University)
The COVID-19 pandemic changed the course of everyday life and created fear, death, and uncertainty on public health, local communities, and triggered accompanying challenges that faced frontline workers every day. The media highlighted and the world watched frontline workers fight this plaguing uncertainty and deemed frontline workers as the heroes of America. Local communities honored frontline healthcare workers in ways they had been previously unacknowledged. Nonetheless, there is one group among front-line workers that are deeply overlooked: Among all the COVID nurse deaths in the early days of the pandemic, 1 out of 3 nurses who died during the pandemic were Filipino nurse deaths. The media and the medical field rarely discussed these striking statistics. As the death toll rose for these nurses, so did the loss of their valuable stories. Here we will shed light on these lost stories and the stories of the Filipino nurses still standing. Dr. Aprilfaye Manalang began this work with humble intentions to highlight the stories of Filipino nurses in her hometown region of Virginia Beach/Hampton Roads, among the largest Filipino communities in the South. Little research has explored Asian Americans in the South, let alone their faith in God. Filipinos, predominantly Catholic and historically linked to the United States through colonialism, are the third-largest Asian-American community in the country. You can find out more about the project at healingheritage.org.
Marriage, Orthodoxy, and a Vision of Empowerment (MOVE)
Principal Investigators: Jessie V. Ford (Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health), Jennifer S. Hirsch (Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health)
Marriage, Orthodoxy, and a Vision of Empowerment (MOVE) is a research study conceptualized and conducted by our team of Columbia University researchers (led by Drs. Jessie V. Ford and Jennifer S. Hirsch) and Unchained at Last, an NGO committed to ending child and forced marriage in the U.S. We are examining the experiences of marriage, marital sex and intimacy, and parenthood among Orthodox Jewish and formerly Orthodox Jewish individuals in the New York City and the greater New York area. We hope to situate our research findings in an ongoing and broader interdisciplinary conversation about marital and reproductive self- determination in minoritized and insular religious communities across the U.S. To launch this cross-disciplinary dialogue, we are proposing to host a conference as a Joint Project with The Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life (IRCPL). This full-day conference will bring scholars in religious studies, anthropology, criminology, and other disciplines together with community organizers and advocates to critically discuss the complex intersections of religious and public life, including tensions between democratic legal structures, religious freedom, and individual self-determination. We are in conversation with other experts in the social sciences, law, religion, and criminal justice. This conference will provide the opportunity to reframe and complicate existing conversations and research that locates forced marriage and forced reproduction as existing solely within religious and ethnic minority communities – particularly within the Global South - and will lay the groundwork for developing non-carceral approaches to mitigating forced marriage in the U.S.
Joint Projects (2022-2023)
The Books of Jacob Reading and Writing Group
Principal Investigators: Courtney Bender (Religion, Columbia University), Clémence Boulouque (Religion, Columbia University) and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (Religious Studies, Indiana University Bloomington)
This Joint Project provides funding for the inaugural year of a multi-year interdisciplinary group project dedicated to reading The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, first published in Polish in October 2014, and subsequently in English translation in November 2021. An epic historical novel set in eighteenth century Eastern Europe, it gives an account of the rise of the movement around Jacob Frank, a Jewish- born, Christian convert messianic leader who both during his life and in his afterlives has been seen as an arch-heretic of modern Jewish history. Moving across genres of writing, memoir, letters, chronicles, sermons, and more, illustrated with maps and charts and other historical images, evoking characters and voices both human and possibly divine, The Books of Jacob is a remarkable achievement. The novel demands much of the reader who is drawn into a wondering, some- times horrified, complicity with Frank and his efforts to sustain his project.
As a virtuoso portrait of a fascinating and significant historical religious personage, community, and event, The Books of Jacob invites attention from scholars of religion. Taking up threads that other readers and reviewers in Europe (and the US) have identified but not explored at great length, this reading and writing group will work together to consider the religiousness of the work. The group will pay particular attention to the registers and projects of writing religion(s) within Tokarczuk’s novel, using it as an occasion for reflecting anew on our own scholarly and interpretive strategies and practices for investigating, representing, and writing religion in the past and present.
Sacred Liberties and Citizenship Practices in Rio de Janeiro’s Candomblé Terreiros
Principle Investigators: Ana Paulina Lee (Latin American and Ibreian Cultures, Columbia University),
Ana Luiza de Abreu Cláudio (Instituto Moreira Salles) and Nilce Naira Nascimento and Luiz Fernando Vianna (Instituto Moreira Salles)
This Joint Project aims to create a podcast series titled, “Sacred Liberties and Citizenship Practices in Rio de Janeiro’s Candomblé Terreiros.” In a collaboration between Candomblé matriarch Mãe Nilce de Iansã and Ana Paulina Lee, Assistant Professor of Brazilian Studies, we seek to reconstruct histories about the terreiro as a nexus of citizenship practices. The terreiro is often understood as a sacred space in Candomblé religious ceremonies. This project will demonstrate how religious activities and worship practices at terreiros include political rituals. Religious and sociopolitical realms are interconnected in terreiro’s activities, which include social aid and health care networks, food distribution, environmental and biodiversity advocacy, economic entrepreneurship for women, and legal struggles for Afro-Brazilian religious tolerance. The project outcomes will be a launchpad for educational programming, legal advocacy, and public-facing outreach that will address histories of Candomblé terreiros as central locations for the practice of citizenship and expansion of human rights, which also includes the terreiro’s advocacy in protecting nature as juridical persons.
Joint Projects (2020-2021)
AMBEDKAR’S RELIGION
Principal Investigator: Anupama Rao (Barnard College/Columbia University, History and MESAAS)
This project has two interconnected aims. The first is to explore the considerable holdings of the American Marathi Mission located at Burke (UTS) and Andover-Harvard Theological Library. These records provide detailed accounts of the work of Nonconformist missionaries amongst lower-caste and Dalit communities in western India, and allow us to map underexplored links between Christian conceptions of egalitarianism and anticaste radicalism as these developed in tandem across the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. The second aim of the project is to draw on ongoing primary research in these understudied archives as the spine around which to be able to better contextualize the 1956 Buddhist conversion of Dalit leader and Columbia’s native son, B. R. Ambedkar through inquiries into the longer-term trajectories of Dalit religiosity, debates about caste and Hinduism, and the disciplinary formation of comparative religion and cultural anthropology as these together enabled the rediscovery of Buddhism in India.
In brief, the project seeks to provide historical depth and conceptual clarity to answer the question “why Buddhism,” and to better understand the experimental nature of Ambedkar’s Navayana [new vehicle] Buddhism. It does so in two ways, by: a) addressing Ambedkar’s conversion as a critical event that requires a far deeper understanding of regional and historical debates about Hinduism and Buddhism in India, and b) thinking about Buddhist conversion through longer-term religious histories that can be fruitfully explored through our considerable holdings at Burke (UTS), in collaboration with records at the Andover-Harvard Theological Library.
OCEANIC IMAGINATIONS: FLUID HISTORIES AND MOBILE CULTURES
Principal Investigators: Mana Kia and Debashree Mukherjee.
Things look different when viewed from the ocean. Categories such as territory, nation, and region can feel less certain, while embodiment, faith, and emotion can become more immediate. Our thematic – of oceanic imaginations – is designed to explore the theoretical, methodological, and material insights to be gained from an oceanic perspective on culture, religion, and the practices of everyday life. Oceans have for long been understood as conduits of movement linking different land masses and peoples together. As connective zones, oceans push us to break out of the siloes of area studies and think more expansively past the transnational. And thus, we know that the circulation of people, texts, goods, practices, and ideas have thick and deep histories across Africa and Asia. However, beyond economically determined factors, what are the constituting elements of these networks of circulation? Moreover, can we think the ocean not only as a space that connects to other places but as a watery, vital place with its own material specificities? In recent years there has been a shift away from a focus on mobility and economic history, towards cultural and interdisciplinary studies that take the "ocean-ness" of oceans seriously. Much of this work, tentatively termed “critical ocean studies,” is a response to the epistemic provocations of the Anthropocene. We propose to link the insights of an earlier model of oceanic studies that broke new ground in studies of race, colonialism, and material culture, with emerging interests that seek to revitalize our assumptions about the environment, aesthetics, and belief systems. As scholars committed to transregional, anti-imperial, and feminist historiography, the ocean is a particularly rich analytic to think with, as well as a mobile and material place to think from.
RACE, RELIGION, AND THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE
Principal Investigators: Nadia Abu El-Haj and Lana Tatour.
This project aims to explore the relationship between race and religion in the context of Israel- Palestine. We will hold a two-day workshop during which we will discuss papers that explore the nexus of race and religion—as discourse, as political structure, and as a site of subjectivation—in Zionist ideology, the Israeli state, and the Question of Palestine. Through a range of topics and from different disciplinary perspectives, papers will address the historical genealogies and contemporary linkages among race, religion, and settler colonialism and examine how race politics in Israel-Palestine is inextricably tied to the question of religious difference, citizenship status, and political and civil rights.
By putting race and religion into a single analytic frame, the workshop is designed to expand the existing conversation on the different practices and projects of racialization that govern Palestinians (citizens of Israel, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and refugees), the “Other” Jews (e.g., Mizrachim and Ethiopian), and African refugees and asylum seekers. The workshop will bring together Palestinian, Israeli and international scholars and cover topics such as the role of international law in constructing racial subjects along ethnic and religious lines, the racialization of Israel’s citizenship laws, race formation in Palestine, the racialization of territory, the gendered politics of race and religion, antisemitism and antiracism, intra-Jewish racialization, and Black-Palestinian solidarity.
POPULISM AND NEW THEOPOLITICAL FORMATIONS IN THE AMERICAS
Principal Investigators: Maria José De Abreu, Valentina Napolitano, and Bruno Reinhardt.
This workshop aims to establish a dialogue between the critical turn in religious and secular studies and debates around the rise of the radical populist right in the Americas. It explores comparatively new populist theopolitical formations in their relation to a) sovereignty and soil, b) charisma and theatricality; c) neoliberalism and secular-religious assemblages. Whereas the correlation between the continent’s recent turn to the extreme right side of the political spectrum and changes in the religious field (growth of evangelical and Catholic charismatic Christianity) has been widely noticed, the nature of such cross-fertilization remains insufficiently theorized. Our purpose is to explore this theme through comparative inquiry on the shifting structures of religious and political authority in the region, including their theo-political entanglements. We assume that the concept of theopolitics (political theology “from below”) can be a valuable resource to grasp why and how political authority is being newly infused with a theological dimension at a moment in which the liberal democratic social pact is going through a widespread legitimacy crisis. From a geopolitical inception of the Americas and an intra-disciplinary standpoint, we also argue that theopolitics allows for a better understanding of ongoing transformations of theological discourses and practices in the light of an incarnated politics.
THE POLITICAL THEOLOGIES OF EMPIRE AND THE ANTHROPOCENE
Principal Investigators: Timothy Mitchell and Mohamad Amer Meziane.
This project will explore the religious and political dimensions of climate change’s history and theory by focusing particularly on its imperial aspects. It aims at rethinking the narratives of the Anthropocene critically by engaging the colonial dimension of fossil fuel extractions in Asia and Africa with a particular focus on the Middle East, North Africa, and the Sahara. This project is both timely and important to the extent that it proposes to analyze the intertwinement of two central questions of our time: the (re)-politicizations of religion and especially of Islam in postcolonial situations today and the reality of climate change.
Climate change is often dealt with from the perspective of natural science scholars and public policy experts. Deploying a Humanities lens on climate change is nevertheless indispensable for several reasons. First, all theories of the Anthropocene presuppose a historical perspective by which the emergence of climate change can be explained. Second, the very idea of the Anthropocene and the debate it has provoked reactivate a discipline which is the philosophy of history: a reflection on the emergence of modernity at a global level, on its causes but also on the possibility of its end.
THE LEGACY OF BANDUNG HUMANISMS IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION
Principal Investigator: Stathis Gourgouris.
“The Legacy of Bandung Humanisms” is an open-ended ongoing project of collaborative research, begun in 2014 and co-organized by the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University and Global Critical Humanities of the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA, which revisits the legacy of international anti-colonial cooperation in politics and culture that was inaugurated by the Bandung Congress in 1955. The project is envisioned as a multiple-year series of events of various sorts—public conferences, smaller workshops, art exhibitions, joint publications – at the heart of which operates a working study group, composed of faculty and graduate students from a variety of disciplines with members in both campuses. The present proposal, which brings the project into the mandate of IRCPL, envisions furthering international collaboration with intellectuals and artists from regions directly affected by the Bandung legacy, which is meant to be conducted not only in the premises of Columbia University but expressly in local academic and public contexts.
PILOT STUDY: POLICIES OF RELIGIOUSLY-AFFILIATED HEALTH CARE FACILITIES IN THE U.S. SOUTH
Principal Investigators: Katherine Franke and Elizabeth Reiner Platt.
In 2018, the Law, Rights, and Religion Project published a report on the impact of religious policies at Catholic hospitals on access to sexual and reproductive health care. While the limits of Catholic care are increasingly well-documented, little has been published on access to comprehensive, non-discriminatory sexual and reproductive health care in non-Catholic, religiously-affiliated hospitals, including Baptist and Adventist facilities. This is in large part because, unlike Catholic hospitals, which are regulated by a central authority (the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops), other religiously-affiliated providers are not bound by an explicit, written set of religious guidelines. Thus, determining precisely how a facility’s religious identity impacts their institutional policies is a complex undertaking.
This pilot project seeks to investigate and raise awareness about the impacts of religiously-affiliated heath care providers in the U.S. South, both with respect to these institutions acting as employers and as health care providers. We seek to document the prevalence of faith-based health providers in several states including North Carolina, Florida, Texas, and Georgia; their employment policies (e.g., employee health insurance exclusions, nondiscrimination policies); number of employees; public funding received; limits on care provided to the public; efforts to receive religious exemptions from legal requirements; and whether existing legal exemptions or other state policies limit access to care.