Anupama Rao.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.