Feminist Religion

Yale Divinity School seeks to make a tenure track appointment in the field of African-American Religious History, to begin July 1, 2019. The rank of the appointment may be Assistant or Associate Professor with or without tenure. In an ecumenical environment Yale Divinity School prepares students for ordained ministry in diverse Christian churches and for a wide range of professional involvements, including higher education, law, medicine, the arts, management, and public service.

 

For more information: https://apply.interfolio.com/52946

Yale Divinity School and the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University invites applications for an open rank faculty position in medieval Christian theology and history beginning July 1, 2019.The successful applicant may teach a required course on the history of medieval theology at the Divinity school, participate in the undergraduate curriculum of Yale College, engage with Yale’s Program in Medieval Studies, and contribute to the doctoral program in Religious Studies.

 

For more information: https://apply.interfolio.com/53377

A Call for Submissions for an issue of the Abolition journal on “Spirituality and Abolition,” to be edited by Ashon Crawley and Roberto Sirvent.

Abolition is a spiritual practice, a spiritual journey, a spiritual commitment. What does abolition mean and how can we get there as a collective and improvisational project, how can we define it and get there as a desired and desirous practice? To make a claim for abolition as spiritual practice, journey and commitment is to consider the ways abolition — in the historical and contemporary sense including movements against slavery, prisons, the wage system, animal and earth exploitation, racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence, and the death penalty; movements against patriarchy, capitalism, heteronormativity, ableism, colonialism, the state, white supremacy, etc. — necessitates epistemologies that have been foreclosed through violent force by Western thought of philosophical and theological kinds, it is to claim that the material conditions that will produce abolition are necessarily Black, Indigenous, queer and trans, feminist, and also about disabled and other non-conforming bodies in force and verve.

This Call for Submissions asks: what can prison abolition teach us about spiritual practice, spiritual journey, spiritual commitment? And, what can these things underscore about the struggle for abolition as a desired manifestation of material change in worlds we inhabit currently? To ask about the relation between abolition and spirituality is not to contend fundamentally with particular doctrines, creeds or theologies rooted in particularities of religious traditions, though those traditions in their particularities might create a path in the direction of such an idea and imagined possibility. It is to consider the ways abolition provides a framework for thinking with and also against the strictures of doctrine, creeds and theologies that have us contend against each other for purportedly squandered resources of imagined connection. To consider the relation of abolition to spiritual practice, spiritual journey, spiritual commitment, is to underscore the resurgence, survivance, reparation, and oppositional futurities of Black, Indigenous, queer and trans, feminist, and also about disabled and other non-conforming bodies imagination, being in worlds otherwise. We seek essays, poetry, artwork and reflections that attempt to think through these relations and relationalities.

Please submit abstracts to Ashon Crawley and Roberto Sirvent (ashon.crawley@gmail.com and rdsirvent@hiu.edu) by November 1, 2018. Final submissions will be due by March 1, 2019.

We also encourage submissions from incarcerated writers and artists. We can receive mail at:

Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics

1321 N. Milwaukee Avenue

PMB 460

Chicago, IL 60622

Original link: https://abolitionjournal.org/spirituality-and-abolition-call-for-submissions/

The UCLA Center for the Study of Women invites submissions of graduate student paper, roundtable presentation, and poster proposals, and undergraduate student poster proposals for our 29^th Annual Thinking Gender Graduate Student Research Conference.

This year’s conference theme, Feminists Confronting the Carceral State, will focus on gendered regimes of captivity, state violence, and incarceration, emphasizing feminist, queer, trans, abolitionist, and intersectional interventions. The conference will feature a keynote panel of scholars and activists, including:

• Beth Richie, Professor of African American Studies and Criminology, Law and Justice, University of Illinois at Chicago
• Alisa Bierria, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies, UC Riverside
• Colby Lenz, Organizer, Survived and Punished and California Coalition of Women Prisoners; and PhD Student, American Studies and Ethnicity, USC
• Romarilyn Ralston, Program Coordinator, Project Rebound, California State University Fullerton

Much of the policy and research on punishment in the United States has focused on men. Yet, the history and contemporary reality of women’s subjugation to systems of punishment also runs deep and warrants further exploration. Many young women and girls, especially Black, Brown, and Native girls, are ensnared in the carceral state where they are criminalized and surveilled in schools, foster systems, and in their communities. Moreover, transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals are particularly vulnerable to policing and incarceration and state-sanctioned violence.

Feminist abolitionist Angela Davis has illuminated the carceral state’s gendered structure, elaborating the numerous ways that women and LGBTQ communities are made vulnerable to violence, oppression, and harm. In addition to examining the complex range of regimes that constitute the carceral state, and the modes of violence therein, Feminists Confronting the Carceral State heeds Davis’s call for abolition democracy, including broad societal change: the “demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance” (Davis, 2003, pg. 107). This begs the question: how do feminists lead this modern abolitionist movement and rebuild a society deeply scarred by its own criminal justice system?

Feminists Confronting the Carceral State invites presenters to think through approaches that consider the social contexts in which the carceral state operates in feminist, queer, intersectional, and critical ways. Given recent re-commitments to “tough on crime” beliefs and policies, feminists must be at the forefront of resisting and dismantling the carceral state in all areas of society.

 

Deadline: Sunday, October 28 at 11:59pm PDT

Submission information: https://csw.ucla.edu/tg19-cfp

Patriarchy & Political Theology: Call for Participants

We invite applications for a two-day workshop on patriarchy and political theology. What can scholars of political theology learn from gender studies? Why has political theology been so resistant to addressing questions of sex, gender, and sexuality in any serious way? Are there any intersections between queer feminist criticism and political theology, and what would it look like if the two methods were brought together? This workshop will gather a selected group of scholars for two days of focused engagement around the above themes, with the hope that new methods for thinking about and beyond patriarchy and political theology will emerge.

Untenured scholars, alt-academics, and graduate students who have advanced to candidacy are welcome to apply. We are looking for participants coming from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including religious studies, political theory, women’s and gender studies, LGBT studies, ethnic studies, anthropology, history, literature, and theology. The workshop will be held on the campus of Villanova University, March 30-31, 2019. Travel and accommodation costs for selected participants will be covered; support for childcare will be available.

We are particularly interested in applications that move outside the usual boundaries of political theology. To apply, please send a one-page description (up to 300 words) of a question that a workshop of this kind should or could investigate, a list of 3-5 key texts that inform your thinking around these issues, and a CV of no more than two pages. Applications are due by October 30; selections will be made by late November.

Please send application materials or questions to Linn Tonstad (linn.tonstad (at) yale.edu) and Vincent Lloyd (vincent.lloyd (at) villanova.edu).

Sponsored by the Villanova Political Theology Project and the Political Theology Network.

Some of the most exciting work in religious studies, theology, ethics, political thought, and philosophy of religion today is happening in feminist, womanist, mujerista, queer, trans, and intersectional inquiries. But much of this work is dispersed across subfields, making community hard to find.  The scholars of religious sexual ethics may not go to philosophy of religion conferences; the philosophers of religion may not read the religious ethics journals; long-standing alienations between religious studies and theology often isolate potential conversation partners.  Working on feminist, womanist, mujerista, queer, trans, and intersectional inquiries in any field can be isolating in many ways already. Our isolations by subfield in religious studies and theology easily intensify the experience.

Feminist Religion aims to build community among scholars with these interests by providing a space to share opportunities for conferences, publications, jobs, and other endeavors. We are a venue for feminist, womanist, mujerista, queer, trans, and intersectional theorists, theologians, and ethicists in religious studies to coordinate and collaborate. We want to connect scholars working in these areas and increase awareness of opportunities to meet one another and share our work.

We do not aim to be exclusive with respect to field or approach. Please follow us if you are interested in these topics even if you are not in a Religious Studies department. We welcome colleagues from across the university and beyond it.

How it works:

If you are hosting a conference, editing a journal or volume, hiring for a position, etc., let us know! Contact us at admin@feministreligion.com or through the Contact page and we’ll post your announcement.

If you are interested in getting announcements, please click the “Follow Blog Via Email” link on the right side of the page. You will receive emails when we post. In this way, you never need to check the site; you can use it as a listserv (with somewhat better graphic design). Note: you must confirm your email subscription by replying to the site’s confirmation email. Some users have reported that the confirmation email was sent to their junk/spam folders. Please check there if you don’t see the confirmation!

We do not plan to post editorial content unless some reflection on our endeavors here is necessary. Posts will be informative, with links to opportunities and announcements. We don’t like extraneous email, and will try to avoid creating it in your inbox.

Who we are:

We are two scholars of religion and feminist thought, Anna F. Bialek and Molly Farneth. We have happily called religious studies home in our training, teaching, and research, but the feminist dimensions of our inquiries can seem far away from the religious studies conversations in which we find ourselves engaged. We have watched analytic philosophers develop strong communities around feminist, queer, and trans scholarship on sites and listservs like the Society for Women in Philosophy and Feminist Philosophers, and have wished for a version in religious thought. This site is our effort to move beyond wishful thinking.

We are grateful to the many organizations and individuals who have held open a feminist intersectional space in religious studies. Feminist Religion seeks to add to existing efforts by providing a clearinghouse for opportunities and news in the field. We want a place to find things we’d be interested in, and to post things we think others should know about. We cannot envision a place of this kind as anything other than a very large tent. Please feel welcome if you have any vague interest in these topics. And please let us know if you have anything to post that might be of relevance. We will exercise editorial discretion on postings, but with an inclination toward inclusion.

Nota bene: We will not abide harassment or abuse, and reserve the right to delete comments and block users that are abusive to others in our community.