Only when utopia is understood in the present continuous, as arriving without completion, can we make sense of the work…
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.
Prayer is technology. I think.
My dissertation is a comparison of the use of prayer, scripture, science education, and “high technology” in four religious high…
Critiquing reductionism
There are reductive categories . . . that have been and should be abandoned in scholarly discourse because the terms…
Elsewhere, in the saturation of the body
About eight months into my fieldwork, I began to have dreams about the morning disciplinary routines at OISCA’s training centers.…
Avitabile’s handwriting
Pietro della Valle. Pietro della Valle was a highly sociable geek with an interest in all things Middle Eastern, c.…
Why I don’t read non-fiction from Barnes and Noble, and why that’s a problem for public scholarship; or, what I learned in third grade about epistemology and essentialization
I have not been interested in the Barnes and Noble non-fiction section for a long time. There might be a…
Transmitting “secular” oral traditions
Why does our academic culture operate under the assumption that “secular” education is fundamentally distinct from or superior to non-“secular”…
Understanding resacralization (part 1)
Dominant accounts of the religion-modernity relationship, at least among sociologists of religion in the US, have tended to focus mainly…
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…
A question on affect
To write about something that is noncognitive and asignifying requires an incredible stomach for loss; whatever we write about affect…