Lectures
Workshops
Over the course of three years, IRCPL will organize three workshops that examine religious encounters across the two global regions in terms of specific modalities clustered into related themes. The workshops will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to discuss these themes through a comparative and cross-regional lens.
The first workshop, “Word, Sound, Image”, was held in April 2019. It considered diverse processes of communication and the movement of words, sounds, and images across communities in Africa and South Asia. The guiding questions were: To what extent are forms and media shared across religious communities and to what extent are these borrowings unrecognized or explicitly acknowledged? What role do changing technologies play in the rise of new religious movements? How are understandings of materiality changing with the rise of religious reform movements?
In October 2019, IRCPL hosted “Time, Space, Memory.” What role do religious practices, traditions, identities, and boundaries play in the use of space and the articulation of historical memory in religiously mixed communities? How are shared spaces negotiated? To what extent are memories of co-presence and common histories acknowledged and shared? How do religious orientations constitute the experience of time and how are orientations to time, origins, and possible futures changing in the postcolonial era?
Finally, “The Body, Gender, and Sexuality as Forms of Religious Publicity” will consider how bodily practices and ways of doing gender and sexuality are infused with religious significance and shaped by religious and language ideologies, sometimes publicly manifesting in unexpected ways. How are gender practices influenced by the presence of other religious communities, nationalisms, and secular ideologies that may both divide and unite religious communities? How do the divisive practices of colonialism, such as the development of separate codes of personal and family law for different religious groups, continue to resonate in postcolonial law and legal challenges?
