As we gather, we honor and acknowledge that the University of Colorado’s four campuses are on the traditional territories and ancestral homelands of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Ute, Apache, Comanche, Kiowa, Lakota, Pueblo and Shoshone Nations. Further, we acknowledge the 48 contemporary tribal nations historically tied to the lands that comprise what is now called Colorado.
This is not a statement of property. Land is no property. Land is no territory. Land was meant to be free.
The CMRC Seminar
There are many seminars at the university. Why add one more? What is the point of yet another research gathering? At the dawn of a new academic year, we wonder under what skies we have been called to meet now? Through the years we have come to understand our fellowship beyond the conventional modes of academic assembly. What began as a mere reading group has matured into a community of deep sharing and listening, a forum where we don’t horde knowledge and confer degrees. Our Center has achieved a lot in its short history and we will persist in our commitment to lead research in the study of media and religion, but we wish to deepen the radicalism we have been long cultivating in our praxis, and to explore in new ways how the understanding of global religious and mediatic imaginaries can open doors to liberation, in our community and far beyond.
In this space, we have developed an intimate intellectual community and an approach to academic fellowship with multiple tasks, goals, and styles. Over the years, we have supported each other through personal and political crises, read and edited each other’s work, studied authors that deeply challenged the canons in our fields, and rehearsed work before publications and conference presentations. In fact, we believe now more than ever that before the research grants, the polished publications, and the conference talks, there is first the small, slow, and nonetheless audacious incubation of the seminar space.
Moving forward, we wish to double down on the audacity of our space. We ask you to consider with us a simple yet profound question: what does it mean to hold a seminar in the tumult of our times? What should it mean to think in times of live genocide, of climate catastrophe, and the whatever-it-takes doctrine of a rabid capitalism?
What are you here for? Have you thought about your “presence” in this room?
There is no better time to read, think, and write than when things seem to fray at the edges, when exhaustion overwhelms our resolve, and when cynicism cripples our imagination. Our project, if we have one, is to smuggle will in an age of catastrophism. Yes, Trump might win, fascism is on the rise everywhere, wars are fought by arsonists disguised as prophets of peace, climate destruction is unstoppable, racism and misogyny are as rampant as ever, democracy is a farcical battlefield of so-called divine injunctions, our curricula still feel like we are trespassing into the master’s mansion, and our universities teach social justice in classrooms only to repress students when they take the lessons outdoors.
Yet, we have a duty to begin again and stay the course no matter what. We don’t think and write when it is sunny outside. We are the lucky ones because our toolbox has words and ideas and because the chairs we sit on are little thrones we must exorcize to shake off prize and privilege. We must savor our intellectual encounter and greet it with urgency as if it were to disappear the day after.
There is always this year…
This is not just an empty slogan we hear at the start of a political campaign or a corporate jingle to celebrate our resilience and inexhaustibility. We borrow this phrase from Hanif Abdurraqib, a poet and essayist and author of the brilliant book There Is Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. Abdurraqib’s book is about love, loss, enemies, disruption, baldness, sweetness, reassurance, and choreographies of ascension through small rituals of the everyday.
Speaking about the basketball dunk as a form of glorious ascension, he writes, “Have you ever been in the air so long that your feet begin to fall in love with the new familiar, walking along some invisible surface that is surely there, that must be, as there is no other way to describe what miracle keeps you afloat? How long have you been suspended in a place that loves you with the same ferocity and freedom as the ground might, as the grave might, as a heaven that lets you walk in drowning in gold might?”
The defiance of the dunk as an affront to the limits of the ground is a form of winning when winning is impossible. “There is always this year” is the force of expanding the definition of winning, as Audre Lorde would say, to the point there will be no losing.
What if we engaged our space and practice in this seminar as winning without the cynicism of losing hovering above our heads all the time? What if we thought of our work like the ascension of a dunk? As Toni Morrison says, “Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
What shit weighs us down in the university? Our flight begins not only by knocking things down, but also by imagining how to build new spaces, new forms of assembly, and new paths to action.
What new seeds do you bring to this seminar? Welcome to the CMRC.
Fall 2024 Seminar Focus
This Fall, the theme of the seminar will be on problematizing polycrisis. The literature on polycrisis provides a theoretical entry point in religion and media studies and the topic connects well to the Center’s research and teaching mission. Polycrisis is also a generative anchor point to discuss all sorts of other political/religious/economic/cultural themes of crisis in the present moment (like the US election, the war in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, etc.).
This weekly Seminar is a major component of the research and teaching mission of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture. It brings together faculty, graduate students, and visiting fellows from a variety of academic fields with an interest in media and religion. Center fellows explore leading literature in a variety of academic fields, including media studies, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, social theory, and philosophy. 鶹Ժ also receive concrete training in research development, methodology, and analysis, and are mentored through the development of conference presentations and publications.
Center Projects
Religion in Emergent Media Spaces: Collective Study and Liberatory Imagination
Starting in 2025, with the support of the Henry Luce Foundation, Religion in Emergent Media Spaces is a three-year project to build infrastructure for media experimentation at the intersection of religion and liberatory social change. The heart of the project is an investment in the weekly seminar of the CU Boulder Center for Media, Religion, and Culture, already a flourishing convergence of scholars, students, and media practitioners. By opening the door of the seminar to an expanded community, the project will advance it from an eminent academic space to a convergence point for a wider range of participants. These will include prominent thinkers joining us as visiting fellows and media practitioners who will develop innovative media interventions in collaboration with our Center’s early-career researchers. Along the way, the Center will experiment with its own practices of media-making. Taken together, the elements of this project will establish the Center as a site for both incubating impactful media practices around religion and rethinking the basic premises of the academic seminar.
This semester, we will begin planning for the project, including by discussing invitations for potential participants.
CMRC Publication
RHYTHMS: The first issue Rhythms was published in December 2022 and focused on the theme of “writing in times of urgency.” The second issue on "Concepts Under Repair” came out in December 2023. The prompt for that issue was: what is a concept you are interested in repairing, maintaining, resuscitating, or abolishing for the sake of repairing something else?
Expectations
Fellows are encouraged to get involved in center projects over the course of each semester. Please consult with the faculty of the center on how you can best use your time and expertise in these projects or if you have other ideas for collaboration and outreach.
Presentations: fellows are encouraged to present their work this fall on their research and creative work. These are great opportunities to share your work and get valuable feedback. Check with Nandi Pointer to sign up for a time slot at the beginning of the semester.
Schedule & Readings
Week 1: 9/4
Introductions of Faculty and Fellows; Discussion of this semester’s seminar theme
Week 2: 9/11
Intro to seminar theme: Polycrisis
Adam Tooze, “,” Financial Times, 28 October 2022
Kate Whiting and Hyojin Park, “This Is Why Polycrisis Is a Useful Way of Looking at the World Right Now,” World Economic Forum, 7 March 2023
Week 3: 9/18
Permacrisis
Neil Turnbull, “,” The Conversation, 11 November 2022
Kai Heron, “,” Roar Magazine, Issue 10
Week 4: 9/25
Crisis and modernity
Zygmunt Bauman and Carlo Bardoni, State of Crisis (selections)
Week 5: 10/2
Crisis and communication
Timothy Sellnow and Matthew Seeger, Theorizing Crisis Communication, ch 1-2
Week 6: 10/9
Crisis and participatory culture
Henry Jenkins, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism (either first or last chapter)
Mel Monier, “,” Communication, Culture, and Critique 16, no. 3 (2023): 119-125.
Week 7: 10/16
Religion, the secular, and re-enchantment
Charles Taylor, “Disenchantment-Reenchantment”
Optional: “,” in David Morgan & James Elkins, eds., Re-Enchantment (New York: Routledge, 2008)
Week 8: 10/23
Crisis and democracy
Bayo Akomolafe, "," Democracy and Belonging Forum, 7 February 2024
Week 9: 10/30
Crisis, politics, and the body
Giorgio Agamben, Where Are We Now?: The Epidemic as Politics
Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic Is a Portal,” Financial Times, 3 April 2020
Shani Orgad, “Crisis-Ready Responsible Selves: National Productions of the Pandemic,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 16 February 2022
Week 10: 11/6
Crisis and the academy
Sara Ahmed, Introduction: “,” in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Duke University Press, 2012)
Maya Binyam, “,” The Paris Review, 14 January 2022
Week 11: 11/13
Crisis and the environment/Hell
Timothy Morton, “What the Hell: An Exordium,” (Columbia University Press, 2014)
Sarah McFarland Taylor, “F*ck Earth: Unmasking Mars Colonization Marketing, from Planetary Perceived Obsolescence to Apocalyptic ‘New Earth’ Rhetoric,” Journal of Religion, Media, and Digital Culture 11, no. 1 (2022): 54-84
Week 12: 11/20
Tsawalk: An Indigenous approach
Umeek / E. Richard Atleo, “Genesis of Global Crisis and a Theory of Tsawalk,” (University of British Columbia Press, 2011)
Week 13: 11/27
No meeting; Fall break
Week 14: 12/4
Time, Pace, and Counter-Media
Byung-Chul Han, chs. 1-4 in The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering (Polity, 2017)