SORAAAD Book Club

Composing Violence: The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities,
‍Moyukh Chatterjee (Duke, 2023)
Religion, Authoritarianism, and Public Narratives, Part 3
Sunday - April 13, 2025 - Online
10:30 AM - 12:00 PM CST U.S.‍
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The politics of exposure is like taking a well-trod path in the aftermath of political violence. It is familiar, even comforting; it takes us to a place where we see terror and suffering, victims and perpetrators, and it satisfies our desire to unveil hidden actors and conspiracies with the clarity of anger and moral outrage. And yet this comforting attitude may not be adequate to our present moment because far-right movements across the world are based on forms of violence that are fundamentally transformational and productive, public and collective, illegal but licit, often sanctioned by the state, and foundational to the making of “the people.”
Moyukh Chatterjee, Composing Violence, p 6.
Dheepa Sundaram and Ipsita Chatterjea will lead a discussion of Moyukh Chatterjee's Composing Violence: The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities. After a discussion of the book's theoretical and material assertions, the conversation will turn to the utility and extensibility of Chatterjee's theoretical frame regarding "the problem of exposure" and the techniques employed in his study to other situations at the nexus of religion, violence, law and media.

Composing Violence is available via Duke University Press, Bookshop.org and university and college libraries. Duke University Press has made the introduction available, open access.

Please use the form below to register.
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SORAAAD is sponsored by Department of Gender, Religion, and Critical Studies, University of Regina and the Edward Bailey Centre for the Study of Implicit Religion.
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Register: SORAAAD Book Club - April 13, 2025

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We welcome researchers from other disciplines and those interested in the topic at hand. Learn more about SORAAAD....

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Calendar

April 13, 2025
SORAAAD Book Club: Composing Violence, Religion, Authoritarianism and Public Narratives, Part 3
May 16-19, 2025
The 47th Implicit Religion Conference: Religion, Race and Sexuality
May 22, 2025
"Reestablishing Religion" Religion, Authoritarianism and Public Narratives - US, Part 4
May 29-30, 2025
Implicit Religion US Conference: Extensive Effects, featuring a SORAAAD Workshop for students.

"Reestablishing Religion" Religion, Authoritarianism, & Public Narratives -US, Part 4

"Reestablishing Religion" by Richard Schragger, Micah Schwartzman, and Nelson Tebbe. University of Chicago Law Review January, 2025, 92:1, 1-84
Religion, Authoritarianism, and Public Narratives, Part 4
Thursday - May 22, 2025 - Online
12:00 - 1:15 PM CST U.S.‍
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In the last few years, a new pattern has emerged in the doctrine of religious freedom. Religion must be treated equally with respect to public funding and other forms of government support. But with respect to burdensome government regulations, believers are entitled to special treatment in the form of exemptions or accommodations. When these two lines of doctrine are brought together, they create a legal structure in which the state is required to give religious entities preferential treatment as compared to secular counterparts. So far, this emergent regime of structural preferentialism has favored mostly mainstream religious groups, which demand public funding while opposing a range of government regulations, including antidiscrimination and employment laws, education requirements, and public health rules. Reduced to a slogan, this is a constitutional doctrine of equal funding without equal regulation.

Schragger, Shwartzman, Tebbe p. 3 Reestablishing Religion
SORAAAD's Religion, Authoritarianism, and Public Narratives series continues with a discussion of "Reestabling Religion" and Schragger, Schwartzman and Tebbe's assertion of the emergence of "structural preferentialism" as noted above. After discussing the article and the current state of religion and the US; we will discuss the extensibility of "structural preferentialism" as a means of assessment and comparison among societies where majority religions function with legal systems that assert some form of secularism or small "l" liberal democracy.
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Reestablishing Religion is available for download

Registration will open April 14
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SORAAAD is sponsored by Department of Gender, Religion, and Critical Studies, University of Regina and the Edward Bailey Centre for the Study of Implicit Religion.
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Representation and the Analytical Study of Religion

SORAAAD’s 10th year of workshops, with the theme, "Representation and the Analytical Study of Religion" was interrupted by the COVID surge of early 2021, after talks by Richard Newton and Alana Vincent.

The workshop's events have been on hiatus and will, for now, continue online. SORAAAD will resume work on representation, through the focus of its series, Religion, Authoritarianism, and Public Narratives.

Attention to representation in research design, including what factors into how we understand religion and conceive of what we should study, were among the workshop’s originating concerns. In its most basic terms, representation is a means of characterizing and accounting for elements in “a sample” from which we generalize in order to characterize phenomena.

Representation conjures simultaneously the need to address the manufacture and designation of alterity and normativity (SORAAAD, 2012 PDF) , to cultivate a capacity to chart arrays of human expression and activity, to recognize and rectify voids, and to allow this work to change how we compare, explain, and conceptualize (Long, 1995; Moultrie, 2017, Compton et. al, 2017, Garland-Thomson, 2015)
...Continue reading.
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