My colleagues at The Talmud Blog asked me to provide a guest post about my research interests.
Notes from the field
In the summer of 2010, a small group of graduate students who received the SSRC Dissertation Development Research Fellowship (DPDF) blogged regularly for The Immanent Frame. The fellows came together in conjunction with a 2010 DPDF subfield called “After Secularization: New Approaches to Religion and Modernity.”
After the fellowship period ended, a select group of fellows continued the blog through the fall of 2010. In their short contributions to “Notes from the field,” the fellows shared notes and reflections on their emerging research, as well as other insights and questions, ruminations, and observations.
Then, in early June 2011, the SSRC program on religion and the public sphere convened twelve advanced graduate students and five distinguished professors for a five-day dissertation workshop on religion and international affairs. Over the course of the workshop, students shared their ongoing work, considered critiques from student and faculty participants, and debated the coherence of the very banner under which they had been gathered.
All of these reflections and notes from these students are gathered below.
From Oneida to the world (part I)
Tucked in a quiet corner of upstate New York, around a bend in a lonely road, there stands a dramatically…
Understanding resacralization (part 3)
Should religious discourse be welcomed in the public sphere, or should we require that it first be translated into secular…
Understanding resacralization (part 2)
The Rimini Meeting is run almost entirely by unpaid volunteers. Everything from the physical construction and take-down of the arena,…
Affect vs. global totality
The tricky thing about global imaginaries unlike other social imaginaries is the issue of totality. Whereas other kinds of social…
The Help, ethnography, and ickiness
This is a post about the politics of representation, postcolonial theory, and the Hollywood movie, The Help. And it begins…
Normative demands of Islamic studies scholarship
As a lawyer, I appreciate the critical importance of historical inquiry to contemporary legal challenges; as a historian, I resist…
A struggle between faith and human action? Or, a question of apples and oranges
But then here, on another level, a question similar to that of the Christians above arises: when is human action…
A question on affect
To write about something that is noncognitive and asignifying requires an incredible stomach for loss; whatever we write about affect…
Religion in the call center
When I set out to examine the lifestyle changes of employees working night shifts in India’s call centers, I was…