Feminist Religion

Lived Religion in the Digital Age, in partnership with the Pandemic Religion project at George Mason University, welcomes applications for a short-term Digital Stories Fellowship. The Digital Stories Fellow will work from the Pandemic Religion database to create, compose, and/or curate original material for the Digital Stories platform. The fellowship carries an award of up to $1,500.

Digital Stories prioritizes the study and practice of visual, aural, multimodal, and other embodied storytelling techniques, particularly as they are shaped, transformed, or confronted by digital life and cultures. Preferred contributions include visual essays, short documentaries, soundtracks or podcasts, data visualizations, digital exhibits, multimediated content, and short essays, among other possible modes of public scholarship. The Digital Stories fellow will have expertise in religion, theology, American studies, performance studies, visual studies, or related fields or professions and will contribute a series of original entries to the site during the funding period.

This fellowship is expected to begin immediately and be completed by December 31, 2020.

To apply, please submit a letter of interest (1-2 pages), current CV or resume, and brief writing or multimedia sample (links to digital content are encouraged).

Please submit fellowship application materials or general queries to LRDA Administrator Dr. Samantha Arten at livedreligion@slu.edu. Applicants may also apply through this form. Applications received by June 15 will receive full consideration.

In addition to this fellowship, Digital Stories welcomes contributions on a rolling basis. Please contact Digital Stories Editor, Dr. Adam Park (adam.park@slu.edu) for questions and submissions.

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Supported by the Henry Luce Foundation and Saint Louis University College of Arts and Sciences, Lived Religion in the Digital Age seeks to better understand religion in American public life through collaboration with members of local and dispersed communities representing diverse traditions, histories, and practices. Attending to sounds, sights, and space, as well as to teachings and texts, our research team, including research and teaching fellows, resident artists, and faculty across the disciplines, works to build a robust multisensory inventory of religion as it is lived and studied in the complex realities of modern life. Read

more about the Lived Religion in the Digital Age project at religioninplace.org.

Pandemic Religion: A Digital Archive, a project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, documents the many ways that American religious communities have been challenged and reshaped by the COVID- 19 pandemic. Institutions and members of the public contribute items — narratives, photographs, videos, and the like — that are then displayed and curated at pandemicreligion.org.

The Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal (RSDR) Fellowship of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) aims to bring knowledge of the place of religion and spirituality into scholarly and public conversations about renewing democracy in the United States. These fellowships are offered by the SSRC’s Program on Religion and the Public Sphere with the support and partnership of the Fetzer Institute.

Applications are due March 16, 2020. Apply online at apply.ssrc.org. OVERVIEW

Since the country’s founding, scholars and citizens alike have debated religion’s place in US politics and civil society. The current moment is no exception. And while there are echoes from the past, the context within which American religion presently engages the public sphere is in many ways dramatically different than earlier historical moments. During the past half-century alone, the American religious landscape has undergone dramatic changes, including both rising religious diversity and rising religious disaffiliation. Both shifts have prompted scholars to consider anew the relationship between religion and spirituality. The political landscape, too, has been transformed by myriad, often countervailing, forces, including an increasingly diverse citizenry, rising social and political inequality, and sharpening polarization. This is an especially important and complex time for discerning whether, how, and under what conditions religion and/or spirituality shape American democracy, and vice versa.

Through research on the intersection of religious and/or spiritual identities, behaviors, attitudes, and organizations with social and political structures, processes, and institutions, RSDR fellows will deepen understanding of the evolving relationships between religion, spirituality, and democracy at this fraught moment in US history.

ELIGIBILITY AND CRITERIA

The RSDR fellowship program invites proposals for research at the intersection of religion, spirituality, and democracy in the United States. The fellowships offer research support over a period of up to 12 months to doctoral students who have advanced to candidacy and to postdoctoral researchers within five years of their PhD. Doctoral candidates will receive up to $15,000 and postdoctoral researchers up to $18,000 toward research-related expenses. Applications are welcome from scholars at either of these career stages from any country around the world.

We welcome proposals on all aspects and dimensions of religion and spirituality in its relation to democracy from across all fields in the social sciences, humanities, and theology. Proposals will be evaluated by a multidisciplinary selection committee on their overall quality and their potential to deepen understanding of the role that religion and spirituality play in democracy and to inform practical engagement around these issues. Applications, especially from postdoctoral researchers, should demonstrate strong interest in disseminating findings both to academic audiences and to practitioners and broader interested publics.

Fellowship funds will typically be used for activities directly related to research, such as travel expenses and accommodations, research equipment and supplies, support for research assistants, and costs for access to publications or proprietary databases. In exceptional cases, and in consultation with program staff, award funds may be used to cover other expenses.

RESEARCH THEMES

Applicants may address questions such as (but not limited to):

1. Have recent shifts in American religiosity inhibited or strengthened the various forms of civic engagement associated with democratic citizenship? In what ways? How do religious institutions, discourses, and practices either contribute to or undermine civic engagement?
2. Have recent changes in the American religious landscape affected public understandings of when and how religion is a legitimate part of civic engagement? If so, how? Conversely, do changing modes of civic engagement (e.g., use of digital and social media) shape the way religion enters the public sphere?
3. As growing socioeconomic inequality and new dynamics of participation and exclusion shape American civil society, have patterns of religious affiliation, organization, and intensity been affected? In what ways? Conversely, have religious leaders and organizations responded to socioeconomic change and new patterns of associational life? How?
4. What new constructive conceptions of democracy are emerging from within or among different religious and spiritual traditions? Relatedly, what immanent critiques of antidemocratic tendencies within different religious and spiritual traditions can be identified and articulated?

Additionally, projects that investigate the religious or spiritual dimensions of topics central to related SSRC programs in Anxieties of Democracy and Media & Democracy (e.g., inequality, identity, political participation, the impact of social and other media on democracy, immigration, and the politics of climate change) are welcome.

ADDITIONAL FELLOWSHIP ACTIVITIES

The fellowship includes participation in an interdisciplinary workshop upon the completion of RSDR-funded research. These workshops will focus on fostering interdisciplinary dialogue on key research topics, writing, public communication strategies, and cohort building.

Participants will be expected to contribute at least one essay to the SSRC’s flagship web forum on religion and secularism, The Immanent Frame (TIF).

TO APPLY

Applications must be submitted through the SSRC’s online application system no later than 11:59 p.m. EST on March 16, 2020. Applications will consist of a research proposal, a short application form, a curriculum vitae, and a letter of reference. Apply now at apply.ssrc.org.

The Social Science Research Council, with support from the Henry Luce Foundation, is pleased to announce the Religion and the Public Sphere Summer Institute for Early-Career Scholars. This week-long institute will take place July 16-22, 2020 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Applications are due January 31, 2020.

The goal of the 2020 Summer Institute is to bring together early-career scholars conducting research on, or beginning new projects on, the ways in which religion intersects with two critical public issues: social justice movements and environmental crises. Through a series of small seminars and workshops led by senior scholars, and unstructured time for reading, writing, and reflection, the Institute provides an intensive but informal setting for cross-disciplinary dialogue, exploring research design, presenting research findings, and networking with peers concerned with the ways in which religious ideas, practices, actors, institutions, and movements engage the public sphere. Following the workshop, participants interested in pursuing collaborative projects with each other will be eligible to apply for small seed grants to develop their projects.

SUMMER INSTITUTE THEMES

The Institute is open to advanced doctoral candidates and recent postdocs from all fields in the social sciences, humanities, and theology. We invite applications from early-career scholars who work on, or seek to work on, either of the following:

Religion and social justice movements in transatlantic perspective. This theme will focus on Europe and North America (including the United States, Mexico, Central America, Canada, and the Caribbean), but is also open to projects that include research in other regions, such as other home countries of immigrants to the global North. Projects for this theme might address questions such as:

• How are religious leaders, actors, and organizations publicly responding to growing social inequality and to exclusionary populist mobilizations targeting racial minorities and immigrants? And with what kinds of effects?
• How do religious actors understand the sources and dynamics of social inequality and exclusion (locally, nationally, globally), and how does this understanding shape the ways they approach them?
• What kinds of transnational dialogues and intersections exist among religious actors to mutually support and learn from each other, and to imagine transnational responses to inequality and exclusionary populism? To what extent are such transnational dialogues and intersections reshaping local and national movements, whether religious or political?

• How are spiritually rooted forms of expression (practice, ideas, feelings, symbols, etc.) invoked in activism for social justice? How does this shape the internal dynamics within these movements or their cultural or political impact in the wider world?

Religion, spirituality, and environmental crises. This theme is open to projects from scholars working in any world region. Projects for this theme might address questions such as:

• How does religion—broadly understood to include ethics and spirituality—play a role in the way people are interpreting radical shifts in their environments, such as those that increase threats to health, economic thriving, or social stability? How are communities, or movements, integrating experience and information about the changing environment into their lives?
• As ethical, spiritual, and theological principles inform humans’ relationships with and responsibilities to nonhumans and to the natural world, what new environmental movements are emerging? Or how are existing movements shifting the focus of their work? To what degree do religious or spiritual institutions and values help or hinder the organizing of these movements in the face of environmental crisis? How might religiosity facilitate translocal or global connections across such movements?
• How are scientific and religious ideas and narratives transmitted globally, and what is the role of technology in mediating these ideas and narratives? As new information and disinformation about environmental change and adaptation moves around the globe, how are religious beliefs, practices, understandings, and discourses about the environment being communicated, and with what effects?

  The 2020 Summer Institute will include separate sessions for each of the two themes in which participants engage with others working within their theme, as well as shared plenary sessions that will focus more broadly on the role of religion in the public sphere and overlapping analytic concerns.

  ELIGIBILITY

  Students currently enrolled in a PhD program who have advanced to candidacy (must have completed all requirements for the PhD degree except for the dissertation by June 2020) and recent postdocs (those who were granted their PhD during or after spring 2015) from fields in the social sciences, humanities, and theology are invited to apply for the Institute. There are no restrictions in terms of the citizenship or geographic location of the applicant.

  TO APPLY

  Applications must be submitted through the SSRC’s online application system no later than 11:59 pm EST on January 31, 2020. Applications will consist of a narrative description of a current research agenda, a short application form, and a curriculum vitae. Apply now at apply.ssrc.org.

The Religion and Sexual Abuse Project seeks proposals for six grants of $20,000.

The Project is made up of a team of religious studies scholars specializing in a range of traditions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Yoga, NRMs, and Catholicism. The grants will fund projects that promise to benefit the scholarly study of sexual abuse across religious traditions and cultures. The grants could support writing projects, workshops, conferences, special programs, documentaries, theater productions, visual art projects, or other endeavors related to research on religion and sexual abuse. Collaborative projects are welcome. The team will select researchers who specialize in areas that complement or contribute to the existing research team’s expertise. For example, we encourage applications from those specializing in Protestantism, such as Evangelicalism and Southern Baptist denominations, the Black Church, Mormonism, Judaism, Islam, or Indigenous traditions. We are also interested in thematic projects that engage critical race theory, ethnic studies, trauma studies, childhood studies, gender and sexuality, religion and violence, or religion and law. We strongly encourage applications from scholars of color, and junior or contingent faculty.

All grant proposals should include the following:

• Complete contact information and Abbreviated CV (max. 2 pages)
• Project Narrative (max 500 words): A narrative description of the project detailing how the project promises to benefit the scholarly study of religion and sexual abuse.
• Timeline (max 200 words): A clear timeline for the completion of the grant. Please note that projects are to be completed within four years of award announcement.
• Two-page Budget and Budget Justification: A detailed budget, including office expenses, travel expenses, honoraria, stipend, and other expenses. Please note that institutional overhead costs may not be included in this budget.

The Religion and Sexual Abuse Project is a collaboration between scholars of religion with a range of expertise. We aim to further scholarly understandings of the dynamics of sexual abuse and misconduct in religious communities. Project leaders acknowledge the deep harm that sexual abuse causes as well as the importance of situating sexual abuse in broader cultural, historical, and social contexts. This project aims to support conversations between different stakeholders in a range of domains, including academia, religious communities, the media, and advocacy platforms. The Religion and Sexual Abuse Project is funded at the level of $550,000 by the Henry Luce Foundation. These funds support the academic projects of the leadership team, additional grants, conferences, collaborations with advocacy organizations, pedagogical resources, and an online resource hub. Members of the leadership team all have PhDs and hold positions at the rank of associate professor at colleges or universities. Some are members of religious communities. Others have no personal relationship to the communities they study. Participants in this project are committed to transparency regarding their positionalities.

Funding for the grants provided by the Henry Luce Foundation.