Events

Call for Abstracts: ICA Preconference on "Echoes and Overlaps in Arab and African Thought on Media and Culture"

Nathan Schneider — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 15:44:43 +0000

Call for Abstracts: ICA Preconference on "Echoes and Overlaps in Arab and African Thought on Media and Culture" Nathan Schneider Wed, 10/23/2024 - 09:44

Nabil Echchaibi

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Fire on the Mountain: Media, Religion, and Nationalism - Conference Videos

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 02:56:05 +0000

Fire on the Mountain: Media, Religion, and Nationalism - Conference Videos Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 01/18/2024 - 19:56

Conference Information

Philip Gorski: Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale University. He writes on religion and politics in early modern and modern Western Europe and North America from a comparative historical perspective. His current work focuses on the history and politics of White Christian Nationalism and American Civil Religion. He is the co-author of The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy.

Watch

Ramesh Srinivasan: Professor of information studies and design media arts at UCLA and Director of UC Digital Cultures Lab. He writes about the intersection of technology, innovation, politics, business, and society. A Bernie Sanders campaign surrogate and author of Beyond the Valley: How Innovators around the World are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow, Srinivasan militates for a democratic Internet and a digital bill of rights around the world.

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Reiland Rabaka: Professor of African, African American, and Caribbean Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies and Founding Director of the Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His books include W.E.B. Du Bois and the Disciplinary Decadence of Sociology; The Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism; and Black Power Music! Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement.

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Fire on the Mountain: Media, Religion, and Nationalism

Anonymous — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Fire on the Mountain: Media, Religion, and Nationalism Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/13/2023 - 00:00

The Center for Media, Religion, and Culture
University of Colorado Boulder

January 10-13, 2024

Program Videos

Jump to: Call for Proposals | Logistics | Featured Speakers

The title of this conference is not a mere play on words or a dramatic ploy to get your attention. Nor is a reference to the threat of fire looming far and near just a convenient metaphor to think with. There is indeed fire on the mountain and its billowing smoke is visible everywhere. Nationalism pervades our lived imaginaries. It is a fire kindled by the ambers of hardened racial identities, cultural fundamentalisms, religious extremism, and deep political polarization. Consider the nostalgic chorus of Trump’s Make America Great Again and its racial and religious overtones, the spectacular display of white Christian nationalism during the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the far-right messianism of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and its slogan to defend God, Country, and Family, the triumph of Christian nationalist parties in Poland and Hungary and their xenophobic campaigns against refugees, the increasing persecution of religious minorities by Hindu nationalists in India, the intimate marriage between Brazil’s Bolsonaro’s populism and evangelical Christians, the Ottoman nostalgia and Islamic nationalism of Turkey’s Erdogan, the religious politics of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the crackdown on Muslims by Buddhist nationalist monks in Myanmar, the persistent Jewish nationalism of Israel in occupied Palestine, and the alliance of Russia’s Orthodox Church with Putin’s dark plans in the ongoing assault against Ukraine.

Nationalism has a deep history rooted in empire, territory, capitalism, globalization, race, ethnicity, language, culture, and religion, but its disturbing resurgence today prompts us to ask old and new questions about its sources, the reasons behind its appeal, its rhetorical devices, its mythological foundations, its storytellers, its mediations, its affects, and its futures. There may be nothing inherently or inevitably religious about nationalism, but a growing convergence of religion, national pride, and exclusionary identity politics, while not new, is generating arguably distinct media cultures centered on fermenting nationalist passions and buoyed by the sophisticated aesthetics and communicative power of a different media apparatus. We wonder, as Mark Juergensmeyer asks, “why have limited loyalties and parochial new forms of ethno-religious nationalism surfaced in todays’ sea of post-nationality?”, that is in a so-called ‘global world’ marked by mass migrations, travel, transnational networks, and ease of communication.

Religious nationalism today emerges in the context of a new media ecology, and we will ask how we can trace the saliency, follow the reproduction, and perhaps reveal the invisibility of this enduring ideology and its narratives given the nature and affordances of our pervasive and complex media environment. Put simply, this conference probes the intimate nexus between media, religion, and nationalism. In doing so, it also hopes to locate other pathways for the expression of national consciousness that is unburdened by the dualism of us and them and the toxic delirium of fetishized identity. In Wretched of the Earth, the Martinican philosopher and activist Frantz Fanon warned against a nationalism too constrained by the colonial logic of the Enlightenment and rooted in a racialized script of exclusion and border thinking that is endemic to nation building. Instead, he understood national consciousness as an emergent and expiring liberatory project that is fully committed to both the local and the transnational and a persistent effort to find a collective future grounded in the relational fecundity of difference, not the weaponized nostalgia of sameness. That call against replacing one imperial supremacy with another form of anxious supremacy should be a resonant plea at the heart of our global crisis today.

This will be the tenth in a series of successful international conferences held by the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture in Boulder. The previous meetings have brought together an interdisciplinary community of scholars for focused conversations on emerging issues in media and religion. Each has proven to be an important landmark in the development of theory and method in its respective area and has resulted in important collaborations, publications, and resources for further research and dialogue.

Conference as Glitch

Since the beginning of the pandemic, our Center has been focused through its weekly seminar on reading about crisis and urgency, repair and abolition, hope and resilience. We heard from scholars who asked, “why we write and for whom” and listened to artists and activists plead to slow things down, to renew with the bliss of coalition, and to challenge our habits of assembly. In the spirit of the call not only to notice the fire on the mountain and with the sensibility of generous fellowship, we would like to extend a similar invitation to the participants of this conference.

Do we just pretend like nothing happened and continue business as usual now that the ugliness has been covered again? Do we simply return to the safety and privilege of our isolated towers and pass up a unique opportunity to turn our gathering into a real occasion for transformative possibility? Do we resign to the intellectual gratification of our academic conversations and remain haunted by the inaudibility of our ideas beyond the walls of our extravagant hotels and convention centers?

We invite you to think with us, to rehearse together, how we can remedy the study space and scope of the Conference beyond the neoliberal jingles of speed, relevance, visibility, and publicity, how we can refuse the institutional tameness of our gatherings to air out the real gasps behind our intellectual commitments, and how we can defy the lure of the temporary fix in favor of remaking the world anew. What is the point of conferencing in the wake of catastrophe? We must dare to ask: what do we want from this conference? What do we want from us? The world screams for radical departures, for gatherings that match the chaos of the times.

This is not a nostalgic plea to return to some glorious past of the academic conference. This is a gentle chorus to find that elusive symphony of being ‘really’ and ‘deeply’ together for the sake of something that far exceeds our intellectual ecstasy and is radical enough to justify the environmental folly of our costly travels. “There is fire on the mountain” is not a pretty slogan. It is an invitation to go off script together.

Call for proposals

The conference will feature keynote lectures and roundtable conversations, as well as thematic panels and artistic performances. We invite papers and panels from across disciplines, intellectual traditions, and geographic locations that engage with these questions and beyond. Possible topics could include but are not limited to the following:

Coloniality, imperialism, and religious nationalism
Nationalism, race, ethnicity, gender, and religious identity
Religious nationalism, media, and political theology
The global rise of right-wing populism, religion, and media
Counter-discourses of sovereignty and self-determination
Decolonial critiques in the study of religion, media, and nationalism
Nation, nationalism, and globalization
Secular nationalism “versus” religious nationalism
Religion, nationalism, and social media
Religious nationalism, journalism, conspiracy theories, and disinformation
Religion, nationalism, and transnational networks

Abstracts of individual papers and panels of 300-350 words should be submitted to cmrc@colorado.edu by July 30, 2023. Please include your email address and university affiliation in your submission.

For questions, email Nabil Echchaibi, Director: nabil.echchaibi@colorado.edu
Or Deborah Whitehead, Associate Director: deborah.whitehead@colorado.edu

Logistics

Travel to and around Boulder

Hotels (with conference links)

Featured Speakers

Philip Gorski flyer

Raka Shome: The Harron Family Endowed Chair, and Professor of Communication at Villanova University. She writes on postcolonial cultures, transnational feminism and nationalism as they intersect with media/communication cultures. Her current research interests are in Asian (and non-western) Modernities, Contemporary Indian (Hindu) Nationalism and Gender; the Global South; Transnational Politics of Knowledge Production as a Communication issue. She is the author of Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture. Dr. Shome is currently finishing up a book Cleansing the Nation: Hindu nationalism, Gender and the Clean India campaign (contracted with Duke U Press). She is a Distinguished Scholar of National Communication Association (USA) and an elected fellow of International Communication Association.

Raka Shome flyer

Ramesh Srinivasan flyer

Reiland Rabaka flyer

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Rhythms Launch: Why Do You Write?

Anonymous — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Rhythms Launch: Why Do You Write? Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 10/30/2022 - 01:00

On 11/30/2022, the Center for Media, Religion and Culture will host an event at Ice Overlook in the CU Rec Center to celebrate the launch of our new publication, Rhythms.

Last year, the fellows of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture, challenged themselves with a provocative question: Why Do You Write? We set out to probe the motivations behind our scholarship and creative work, the commitments that animate our teaching, and the aspirations that guide our engagement with the world. Our slow and wandering conversations grew richer and immensely affirming as they turned to haunting questions about the (in)accessibility of our writing, the (in)audibility of our thinking, the utility of our modes of gathering, the exhaustion of our will, and the urgencies of our times. “Why we write” became a rallying prompt to ask much broader questions about our academic habits and rhythms in urgent times. When the roof is on fire, we asked, why do you write?

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Religion & Media in the 2020 Election Webinar

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 07:00:00 +0000

Religion & Media in the 2020 Election Webinar Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/07/2020 - 01:00

Religion & Media in the 2020 Election: Faith, Fraud, and Fear

5pm EST, 4pm CST, 3pm MST, 2pm PST

The Center for Media, Religion, and Culture hosted a webinar on religion and media in the 2020 U.S. election. Our four panelists will discuss the place of religion in the so-called "Trump era," the role of media in generating new forms of religious politics, and the on-going relationship between religion and media in U.S. electoral politics.

Watch the recording of the webinar here.

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Spring 2020 Workshop: Call for Applications

Anonymous — Sat, 01 Feb 2020 07:00:00 +0000

Spring 2020 Workshop: Call for Applications Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 02/01/2020 - 00:00

Call for Junior Scholar Applications
2020 Spring Workshop, “Public Scholarship of Religion in an Age of Hypermediation”
May 6-10, 2020, Boulder, Colorado, USA

The research project "Religion and Public Scholarship in the Media Age,” announces a call for applications from Junior Scholars (early-career faculty, post-docs, or dissertation-level doctoral students) to participate in a four-day collaboration and mentoring workshop. Participants will take part in a series of conversations and interactions with the project’s Working Group (below) focused on emerging critical questions focused on the challenges of public scholarship in contemporary media cultures. The present era has been said to be defined by “hypermediation” where the speed, acceleration, logics, layerings, contradictions and affordances of ubiquitous mediation have become the conditions of contemporary knowledge-building. This calls into question traditional approaches to public scholarship which conceive of it according to a “publication model” where scholarship is seen as a hermetic resource that simply needs to be shared along known and taken-for-granted avenues of dissemination. Hypermediation means that this model is too simple and at least fails to account for the range of ways and locations that religion and knowledge of religion are produced today.

Applications are sought from scholars whose work responds to or addresses these conditions, or who wish to engage their work with evolving discourses about public scholarship. In addition to participating in dynamic conversations with Working Group members, successful applicants will have the opportunity to present their work in a seminar setting and receive feedback from other participants and from Working Group members. We intend these four days to be an opportunity for engaged scholarly interaction and dialogue, and to form a network of interaction and collaboration on these important questions. These ongoing conversations may well for the basis for further opportunities, including publications of various kinds and in various forms.

Applicants should prepare a dossier with a brief letter of proposal, a current CV and an example of
recent written scholarship and send these materials to: cmrc@colorado.edu

Note “Spring Workshop Application” in the subject line.

Applications will be considered until February 15, 2020 and successful applicants will be notified soon after.

All expenses for travel and attendance will be paid by the project.

Center for Media, Religion, and Culture
1511 University Avenue, 0478 UCB
Boulder, Colorado, 80309-0478 USA
+1 303 492 1357

Questions may be addressed to any of the project’s directors: Deborah Whitehead
(deborah.whitehead@colorado.edu); Nabil Echchaibi (nechchai@colorado.edu); Nathan Schneider
(nathan.schneider@colorado.edu); Stewart Hoover (hoover@colorado.edu).

Members of the Public Scholarship Project Working Group

Anthea Butler
University of Pennsylvania

Christopher Helland
Dalhousie University

Sarah McFarland Taylor
Northwestern University

Peter Manseau
The Smithsonian Institution

Jenna Supp-Montgomerie
The University of Iowa

Mirca Madianou
Goldsmiths College, University of London

Sarah Banet-Weiser
London School of Economics

Marwan Kraidy
University of Pennsylvania

Stewart Hoover
University of Colorado

Nabil Echchaibi
University of Colorado

Deborah Whitehead
University of Colorado

Nathan Schneider
University of Colorado

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2020 Imagined Borders, Epistemic Freedoms

Anonymous — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 07:00:00 +0000

2020 Imagined Borders, Epistemic Freedoms Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 06/12/2019 - 01:00

Announcing a CMRC conference in collaboration with SIMAGINE

January 7-11, 2020

Registration Fees (Including lunch & refreshments daily): $250/ faculty; $150/ non-OECD Country Residents & �鶹��Ժ; Day rate of $50 available

The question of borders and the practice of bordering persist in a world destined for encounters and confrontations. This persistence today bears resemblance to long-standing legacies of coloniality, modernity, and globalization, but it also foregrounds new narratives, aesthetics, and politics of exclusion and dehumanization. Talk of walls, fortresses, boundaries, and deportation has never been a political or philosophical anomaly, but rather a reflection of a particularistic social imaginary, a linear compulsion of epistemic assumptions that sees the world through the logic of hierarchy, classification, difference, and ontological supremacy. This foreclosure is a widely shared and accepted social imaginary, as demonstrated in current scholarship in the critical humanities and social and political sciences: a foreclosure that has also defined institutions and disciplines of knowledge production which continue to marginalize other knowledge systems and intellectual traditions and refuse to acknowledge their viability and legitimacy in the academy. Disciplinary walls and intellectually demarcated canons within the Western and Westernized university in the Global North and South have generally produced narrow curricula and models of learning that reproduce selective systems of thought, discourses and practices.

The tenacity of this normalized worldview requires urgent new imaginaries: a decolonial perspective not only to call out the ontological instability of Western theory, but also to establish a sense of epistemic hospitality capable of liberating and re-centering other ways of knowing and dwelling in the world. This contestation of physical and cognitive borders has found its most ardent proponents in recent movements such as #RhodesMustFall, Standing Rock, Idle No More, Undocumented and Unafraid, #Whyismycurriculumsowhite, Arab Uprisings, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo, among others. At the heart of this decolonial injunction is a desire by absented voices to reclaim the right to self-narrate, to signify, and to render visible local histories, other temporalities, subjectivities, cosmologies, and struggles silenced by Western and Westernized accounts of the world.

The fields of art, religion and the media have not yet come under historical scrutiny about their own epistemic and existential imaginaries and whether they reify or disrupt dominant structures and legacies of knowledge production? Drawing from a variety of intellectual traditions and established academic disciplines, these fields risk carrying the same blind spots, the same foreclosures, the same ontological foundations, and the same centered claims to universality. What can a decolonial critique then do to avoid a zero-sum epistemology? And how can we develop new decolonial imaginaries as an invitation to undo the Eurocentrism of our paradigms, challenge the verticality of our pedagogical designs, and achieve an ethics of interpretation, an epistemic justice whereby theories from the South or from ‘the margins’ in the North are not treated merely as local or subjective? The decolonial attitude challenges us to avoid embracing singular universalities, and rethink altogether the hierarchies of global-local and of universal-particular that underlie this world’s inequality.

This will be the ninth in a series of successful international conferences held by the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture in Boulder. The previous meetings have brought together an interdisciplinary community of scholars for focused conversations on emerging issues in media and religion. Each has proven to be an important landmark in the development of theory and method in its respective area and has resulted in important collaborations, publications, and resources for further research and dialogue.

The 2020 conference is organized in conjunction with SIMAGINE, an international and interdisciplinary research consortium bringing together partners from the USA, the UK, Europe and South-Africa; it is hosted by the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and dedicated to the study of social imaginaries between secularity and religion in a globalizing world. SIMAGINE has organized conferences on ‘Religion, Community, Borders’ leading to a special issue of the open access Journal for Religion and Transformation in December 2019. In 2018 the consortium published the volume Social Imaginaries in a Globalizing World.

Featured Speakers

Ann Stoler
Ann Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research. Stoler is the director of the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry. She has worked for some thirty years on the politics of knowledge, colonial governance, racial epistemologies, the sexual politics of empire, and ethnography of the archives. She has been a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études, the École Normale Supérieure and Paris 8, Cornell University’s School of Criticism and Theory, Birzeit University in Ramallah, the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, Irvine’s School of Arts and Literature, and the Bard Prison Initiative. Recent interviews with her are available at Savage Minds, Le Monde, and Public Culture, as well as Pacifica Radio and here.

Her books include Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002, 2010), Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009) and the edited volumes Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (with Frederick Cooper, 1997), Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (2013), and Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (2016).

Catherine Walsh

Catherine Walsh is a militant intellectual involved for many years in the processes and struggles of social justice and decolonial transformation, first in the US (where she also worked collaboratively with Paulo Freire), and in the last 25 years in Latin America, where she has worked closely with Indigenous and Black social movements. She is presently a Senior Professor and Director of the Latin American Cultural Studies Doctoral Program at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Quito, where she also coordinates the Afro-Andean Documentary and Oral History Archive, the largest archive of black collective memory in Latin America. She has been an invited professor and scholar throughout the Americas, Europe, the Caribbean, and in South Korea and South Africa, and an invited speaker at hundreds of conferences and events throughout the world. Catherine´s current work focuses on the political, epistemic, and existence-based projects of decoloniality and critical interculturality, taking as central axes the geopolitics of knowledge, philosophies of life-existence, ancestral and feminist thought, and decolonial pedagogies-praxis of insurgency, resistance, and re-existence.

Her recent publications include, among others, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, written with Walter Mignolo (Duke Press, 2018); “Decolonial Notes to Paulo Freire Walking and Asking,” in Educational Alternatives in Latin America (R. Aman y T. Ireland, eds., Palgrave/Macmillan, 2019); “Lewis Gordon: Existential Incantations that Cross Borders and Move Us Forward” in Black Existentialism. Essays on the Transformative Thought of Lewis Gordon (Danielle Davis, ed., Rowman and Littlefield, 2019); two volumes in Spanish of Decolonial Pedagogies: Insurgent practices to resist, (re)exist), and (re)live (Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala, 2013 and 2017); “On Gender and its Otherwise,” in The Palgrave Handbook on Gender and Development: Critical engagements in feminist theory and practice (W. Harcourt, ed., London: Palgrave, 2016).

In 2019 Catherine was awarded the prestigious “Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award” by the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

Glen Coulthard

Glen Coulthard is Yellowknives Dene and an associate professor in the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program and the Departments of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), winner of the 2016 Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Book, the Canadian Political Science Association’s CB Macpherson Award for Best Book in Political Theory, published in English or French, in 2014/2015, and the Rik Davidson Studies in Political Economy Award for Best Book in 2016.

He is also a co-founder of Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, a decolonial, Indigenous land-based post-secondary program operating on his traditional territories in Denendeh (Northwest Territories).

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Her work breaks open the intersections between politics, story and song—bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity. Working for over a decade an independent scholar using Nishnaabeg intellectual practices, Leanne has lectured and taught extensively at universities across Canada and has twenty years experience with Indigenous land based education. She holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba, and teaches at the Dechinta Centre for Research & Learning in Denendeh. Leanne's books are regularly used in courses across Canada and the United States including Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, The Gift Is in the Making, Lighting the Eighth Fire (editor), This Is An Honour Song (editor with Kiera Ladner) and The Winter We Danced (Kino-nda-niimi editorial collective). Her latest book, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance was published by the University of Minnesota Press in the fall of 2017, and was awarded Best Subsequent Book by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

As a writer, Leanne was named the inaugural RBC Charles Taylor Emerging writer by Thomas King in 2014 and in 2017/18 she was a finalist in the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Trillium Book Award. She has published extensive fiction and poetry in both book and magazine form. Her second book of short stories and poetry, This Accident of Being Lost is a follow up to the acclaimed Islands of Decolonial Love and was published by the House of Anansi Press in Spring 2017. Leanne is also a musician combining poetry, storytelling, song writing and performance in collaboration with musicians to create unique spoken songs and soundscapes. Leanne's second record f(l)light produced by Jonas Bonnetta (Evening Hymns), was released in the fall of 2016. She was awarded the inaugural Outstanding Indigenous Artist at the Peterborough Arts Awards in 2018. Leanne is Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg and a member of Alderville First Nation.

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2018 ISMRC

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 06:00:00 +0000

2018 ISMRC Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 02/11/2018 - 23:00

The center hosted the 11th biennial conference of the International Society for Media, Religion, and Culture (ISMRC), which explored the relationship between media, religion and public scholarship. This conference was held August 8-11, 2018 and brought together international scholars from various disciplines including media studies, journalism, politics, religious studies, the anthropology and sociology of religion, history, the study of literature and public policy. The conference, since its first meeting, has become the leading international gathering for the discussion of research in religion, media and culture.

Keynote & Plenary Speakers

Anthea Butler
University of Pennsylvania

Anthea Butler is Graduate Chair and Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Butler’s research and writing interests cover religion and politics, religion and media, African American religion, sexuality, gender, and popular culture. She is the author of and Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making A Sanctified World on The University of North Carolina Press. She is currently completing a book project on religion, politics, and evangelicals from 2008 to the 2016 election which will be published with The New Press.

A sought-after media commentator on the BBC, MSNBC, CNN and other media outlets, Professor Butler also provides op-ed on contemporary politics, religion, and race at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. She has also served as a consultant to the PBS series God in America and the American Experience on Aimee Semple McPherson.

Merlyna Lim
Carleton University

Merlyna Lim is a Canada Research Chair in Digital Media and Global Network Society and Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University. Prior to joining the Carleton University, she held research and teaching positions at Princeton University, Arizona State University, and the University of Southern California. In 2016, Lim was named a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s New College of Scholars, Artists, and Scientists.

Lim’s research and teaching interests revolve around social and political implications of media and technology, especially digital media, in relation to issues of justice, democracy and civic/participatory engagement.

Lim’s current research attempts to analyze specific roles of digital media in the politics of transformation, identify regional patterns and constellations of digital media as an instrument for protest and mobilization, and examine how regional and national contexts may define and/or shape mobilizations and social movements. She is currently completing a book on on/offline spaces of global protest movements and another book on the socio-political history of digital media and activism in Indonesia.

John Durham Peters
Yale University

John Durham Peters is María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film & Media Studies at Yale University.

A media historian and social theorist, he has authored a number of noted scholarly works. His first book, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, traces out broad historical, philosophical, religious, cultural, legal, and technological contexts for the study of communication. His second book, Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition, updates the philosophy of free expression with a history of liberal thought since Paul of Tarsus. His most recent book, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, radically rethinks how media are environments and environments are also media. He has held fellowships with the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Leverhulme Trust.

Peters received a PhD in Communication Theory and Research from Stanford University in 1986. He taught at the University of Iowa for 30 years, and began a position at Yale University in 2017.

Schedule

Tuesday, Aug. 7
12 to 5 p.m.: Doctoral student pre-conference workshop
7 p.m.: Opening reception, Koenig Alumni Center (1202 University Ave, Boulder, CO 80302), for registrants only

Wednesday Aug. 8
9 to 10:30 a.m.: Plenary session 1
10:45 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.: Panel session 1
12:15 to 2 p.m.: Lunch
2 to 3:30 p.m.: Panel session 2
5 to 6:30 p.m.: Keynote, Old Main Chapel (1600 Pleasant Street, Boulder, CO 80302); free and open to the public
6:30 to 8:00 p.m.: Reception, Koenig Alumni Center (1202 University Ave, Boulder, CO 80302)

Thursday, Aug. 9
9 to 10:30 a.m.: Panel session 3
10:45 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.: Panel session 4
12:15 to 2 p.m.: Lunch
2 to 3:30 p.m.: Panel session 5
4 to 5:30 p.m.: Plenary session 2

Friday, Aug. 10
All day: Field trips to religious and cultural sites

Saturday, Aug. 11
9 to 10:30 a.m.: Panel session 6
10:45 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.: Panel session 7
12:15 to 2 p.m.: Lunch
2 to 3:30 p.m.: Plenary session 3
4 to 5:30 p.m.: Business meeting
7 to 8:30 p.m.: Banquet, Glenn Miller Ballroom, University Memorial Center (1669 Euclid Avenue, Boulder, CO 80302), for registrants only/RSVP event

*Unless otherwise noted, all events will be in the Village Center Dining and Community Commons.

Field Trips

Following the tradition begun at the 2016 ISMRC conference in Seoul, South Korea, three field experiences were planned that exposed conference participants to the unique religious landscape of Colorado and the Mountain West region of North America.

Indigeneity and Representation in the American West
This field trip took participants to two Denver locations to learn from and about the indigenous experience in the American West. The morning begun at the University of Denver, located on Southern Cheyenne and Arapahoe lands, with a short film about indigenous history and a discussion with Mary Bowannie, an indigenous journalist who writes about Native issues. She set the cultural and historical context for a panel discussion on the contemporary indigenous experience. Faculty and staff from the University of Denver and Iliff School of Theology discussed how the universities participate in, and respond to, indigenous issues. For the afternoon, the group travelled to the Denver Art Museum, host to a world-renowned collection of Native American art and artifacts.

A “Pilgrimage” to Colorado Springs
Colorado Springs, the state’s second-largest city, is internationally known both as a religious tourism destination, and as the headquarters of major Evangelical Christian organizations, institutions, and ministries. Participants began in Boulder with a brief introduction to the history and location, followed by a trip by coach through the front range of the mountains to Colorado Springs. Participants stopped at the unique and world-famous “Garden of the Gods,” a large alpine park featuring fascinating natural rock formations, for lunch. For the afternoon, participants took a guided tour of the headquarters of Focus on the Family, one of the most politically and socially influential of American evangelical organizations. The tour also included a brief stop at the U.S. Air Force Academy Chapel.

The Great Stupa of Dharmakaya in Red Feather Lakes, CO
This field trip visited the largest Stupa in North America, the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya at the Shambhala Mountain Center in Red Feather Lakes. The trip gave participants a sense of the influence of Tibetan Buddhist traditions in the Mountain West region—one of its most important locations in North America—and how these traditions have evolved and adapted with local cultures. Participants had the chance to explore the grounds of the Shambhala Mountain Center, take a guided tour of the Great Studpa, and to have lunch in the dining hall.

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The Crisis of Religion In A Media Age

Anonymous — Sun, 29 Oct 2017 07:00:00 +0000

The Crisis of Religion In A Media Age Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 10/29/2017 - 01:00

Dr. Stewart M. Hoover presents "The Crisis of Religion In A Media Age" on January 26, 2018 at the 18th Annual MacKenzie Lectureship, sponsored by the First Congregational Church in Boulder, Colorado.

Four Center Fellows, along with Deborah Whitehead and Stewart Hoover, led a workshop featuring their work on various aspects of religion and media in the U.S. and abroad at the First Congregational Church in Boulder on January 27, 2018. Presentations can be viewed here.

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2016 International Conference on Media, Gender & Religion

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 07:00:00 +0000

2016 International Conference on Media, Gender & Religion Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 01/11/2016 - 00:00

The Center's conference on Media, Gender and Religion was held at the University of Colorado Boulder on January 7-10, 2016. Invited speakers included Sarah Banet-Weiser, USC Annenberg; Carla Jones, CU-Boulder; Kathryn Lofton, Yale University; Mia Lovheim, Uppsala University; and Monica Miller, Lehigh University.

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Traditional

White

Events

Call for Abstracts: ICA Preconference on "Echoes and Overlaps in Arab and African Thought on Media and Culture"

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Fire on the Mountain: Media, Religion, and Nationalism - Conference Videos

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Fire on the Mountain: Media, Religion, and Nationalism

Conference as Glitch

Call for proposals

Logistics

Travel to and around Boulder

Hotels (with conference links)

Featured Speakers

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Rhythms Launch: Why Do You Write?

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Religion & Media in the 2020 Election Webinar

Religion & Media in the 2020 Election: Faith, Fraud, and Fear

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Spring 2020 Workshop: Call for Applications

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2020 Imagined Borders, Epistemic Freedoms

Featured Speakers

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2018 ISMRC

Keynote & Plenary Speakers

Anthea Butler University of Pennsylvania

Merlyna Lim Carleton University

John Durham Peters Yale University

Schedule

Field Trips

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The Crisis of Religion In A Media Age

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2016 International Conference on Media, Gender & Religion

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Anthea Butler
University of Pennsylvania

Merlyna Lim
Carleton University

John Durham Peters
Yale University