Laura McTighe is Assistant Professor of Religion at Florida State University and the Cofounder of Women With A Vision’s research arm, Front Porch Research Strategy in New Orleans.
For thirty-five years, the New Orleans-based Black feminist collective Women With A Vision (WWAV)... more For thirty-five years, the New Orleans-based Black feminist collective Women With A Vision (WWAV) has fought for the liberation of their communities through reproductive justice, harm reduction, abolition feminism, racial justice, and sex workers' rights. In 2012, shortly after one of WWAV's biggest organizing victories, arsonists firebombed and destroyed its headquarters. Fire Dreams is an innovative collaboration between WWAV and Laura McTighe, who work in community to build a social movement ethnography of the organization’s post-arson rebirth. Rooting WWAV in the geography of the South and the living history of generations of Black feminist thinkers, McTighe and WWAV weave together stories from its founders’ pioneering work during the Black HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s and its groundbreaking organizing to end criminalization in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina---with other movements for liberation as accomplices. Together, the authors refuse the logics of racial capitalism and share WWAV’s own world-building knowledges, as well as their methods for living these Black feminist futures now. Fire Dreams is a vital toolkit for grassroots organizers, activist-scholars, and all those who dream to make the world otherwise.
People are more than the shackles that bind them; this is the truth of Exodus narratives. During ... more People are more than the shackles that bind them; this is the truth of Exodus narratives. During the Great Migration, seven million people traded the southern landscape for the northern Promised Land. Today, more than seven million people are imprisoned, on probation, or on parole. The continuities between slavery and imprisonment are undeniable, and segregation laws under Jim Crow nearly parallel the policies formerly imprisoned people navigate today. However, marginalization through the prison system is only part of the story, just as legalized subordination was only part of the story for black people a century ago. Scholars of religion have illuminated the uniquely urban sacred order created by southern transplants to northern meccas, and, in so doing, have shown how migration itself was a salvific event, not just the result of socioeconomic push-pull factors. Our narrative of religion in a time of mass criminalization must take this consciously liberatory turn: to refuse to yoke black life to the stranglehold of punitive punishment and to dwell instead in the complexities of being and being-together inside our prison nation, where currently and formerly imprisoned people and their families are building their own Promised Lands.
Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society , 2017
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the leaders of the quarter-century-old Women With A Vision (WWA... more In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the leaders of the quarter-century-old Women With A Vision (WWAV) collective launched a coordinated campaign to expose and challenge the criminalization of Black cisgender and transgender women working in New Orleans’ street-based economies. For the simple act of trading sex for money to survive, hundreds were convicted of a felony-level Crime Against Nature by Solicitation (CANS) and forced to register as sex offenders for periods of fifteen years to life. After five years of organizing, WWAV successfully overturned the statute, thereby securing the removal of more than 800 people from the Louisiana sex offender registry list. This article brings a fine-grained analysis to WWAV’s process of organizing against CANS in order to trace the making of this criminalization crisis and to clarify the terrain of the organization’s victory. It argues that WWAV organized through a distinct southern Black feminist tradition in order to disrupt the use of CANS as a technology of post-Katrina predatory policing. By refusing their erasure from the city of their birth, WWAV staff and participants not only rendered visible the mundane terror of targeted criminalization against Black women; they also opened new horizons for Black feminist struggle and collective liberation.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2018
Grounded in eighteen months of fieldwork and a decade of engaged partnership at Women With A Visi... more Grounded in eighteen months of fieldwork and a decade of engaged partnership at Women With A Vision (WWAV)—a black women’s health and social justice collective founded in 1989—this article explores the remaking of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina from the perspective of black feminist social life. By peeling back the histories of violence and struggle surrounding the storm, it reckons with what it means to build home and vision amid the everyday terror that resilience recovery efforts have wrought. Two questions frame this analysis: How have the gendered and racialized logics of resilience been spatialized? And how are the black feminist leaders of WWAV respatializing their city? To answer these questions, this article discusses key methods and practices of black feminist theory, locating authority and expertise over post-Katrina displacement and gendered violence with the black women working on the front lines. In so doing, it identifies and theorizes the resistant possibilities of the front porch as a critical site of black feminist practice for ending intimate, communal, and state violence. To be clear, the front porch here is not a metaphor. Southern front porches are deeply persistent black feminist geographies, made in the interstices through everyday practices of enduring. Porch talks, porch sits, and porch poses take place; they also exceed the space-time of the observer. In these ways, front porches are the grounds for not only for imagining a post-Katrina otherwise but also for realizing the New Orleans landscape anew.
Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis, Nov 2012
This article juxtaposes ethnographic fieldwork and archival research to explore the community-lev... more This article juxtaposes ethnographic fieldwork and archival research to explore the community-level systemic dislocation caused by mass incarceration, its historic and contemporary intersections with the domestic AIDS epidemic, and citizen movements to address these twin epidemics. To engage the fields of public health, critical prison studies and gender studies on questions of borders, vulnerability and social death, I take a community of HIV-positive formerly incarcerated activists in Philadelphia as my guides, and move with them as they work to repair the tenuous threads of communities neighborhood by neighborhood. I conclude that their process of community organizing holds the potential not only to dismantle the prison-created diaspora, but also to break the cages of fear and silence that permeate community experiences of injustice at the hands of the criminal justice and immigration systems.
International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, Jul 11, 2011
In the context of US urban jails, incarceration is often seen as an opportune intervention point ... more In the context of US urban jails, incarceration is often seen as an opportune intervention point for prevention interventions in public health. For the detained individual, it is an opportunity to reflect on individual choices and the potential for changes in one's life course. For population focused public health professionals, jail detention facilities represent a concentration of health risks, and an opportunity to have an impact on a significant portion of those at risk for HIV and other health concerns. This paper presents an innovative education and empowerment model that bridges across jail walls, beginning on the inside, and continuing on the outside of jail where individuals continue to be challenged and supported toward positive health and social choices. The intervention also seeks to foment community activism in the communities to which jail detainees return, thus aiming to have a structural impact. This paper examines both the intervention model and the challenges of examining the effectiveness claims for the intervention at multiple levels.
Islam and AIDS: Between Scorn, Pity and Justice, Feb 2009
In this study, I use the hermeneutics of Qur’anic liberation theology to reapproach the prohibiti... more In this study, I use the hermeneutics of Qur’anic liberation theology to reapproach the prohibition on alcohol use in a time of AIDS and mass incarceration in the United States. Through ethnographically-driven life histories with Philadelphia-based Black Muslim women who are formerly imprisoned and living with HIV, I pose new questions to the Qur’anic verses and the occasions for revelation, positing that the Qur’an itself directs us to the structural environment in which addiction arises, not to the individual culpability of believers who use substances.
Incarceration has become an epidemic in Louisiana. In this state of 4.6 million, one in eighty-si... more Incarceration has become an epidemic in Louisiana. In this state of 4.6 million, one in eighty-six adults are currently on lockdown, forcibly moved from their family homes to serve out decade-long sentences in rural plantation towns. While much ink has been spilled describing this system of racial expulsion, descriptive rehearsals of violence can naturalize our present order of human life, thereby entrenching the very brutalities they purport to oppose. In this paper, I blend ethnography and oral history to trace the geographies and histories that enabled New Orleans’ Women With A Vision to hold their community together in the prison capital of the world after an arson attack left them *place-less*. By centering questions of continuity, I bring into focus the spirit of black diasporic resistance that has guided WWAV’s two-decade-long program of mutual aid and social transformation, where collective histories of interrelatedness can take place and have a place.
Attempts to explain the American obsession with punishment have been beholden to two distinct gen... more Attempts to explain the American obsession with punishment have been beholden to two distinct genealogies: one a religious story of citizen reformation; the other material tale of capitalist accumulation. Neither, however, has adequately accounted for the *religious* roots of anti-black racism in the making of the carceral state. In this paper, I explore the criminalization of street-based sex work in Louisiana and the citizens’ movement for redress at New Orleans’ Women With A Vision. By blending ethnography and oral history with a careful analysis of court documents, police records and media articles, I argue that this heated “fight for women’s lives” not only opens new directions for understanding a religious genealogy of incarceration beyond the Quaker lineage of discipline and punish; it also provides scholars of North American Religions with a charge for revisiting the complex interplay between the religious underpinnings of state control and the spirit of grassroots transformation.
"There are two things that we Americans are particularly zealous about:
(1) Worshipping our Gods... more "There are two things that we Americans are particularly zealous about:
(1) Worshipping our Gods, and
(2) Punishing our criminals.
And these two things are not unrelated.
Without the commonsense religious assumptions about the relationship between crime and moral failure, between suffering and redemption, mass incarceration as we know it would likely be unthinkable and impracticable.
To get a handle on the religious underpinnings of our collective obsession with punishment, I’ve been working with formerly incarcerated elders and their families across the United States
for fifteen years – first as a grassroots activist, and now as an academic. AND I’ve been trying to understand how their religious ideas and practices can offer them such tremendous possibilities for imagining and generating more just ways of doing justice.
The breadth of this project is well beyond the scope of my presentation today, so I am going to focus on my work with formerly incarcerated Muslim women living with HIV in Philly..."
To speak of religion and incarceration in the U.S. is to conjure a long and vexed history. Over ... more To speak of religion and incarceration in the U.S. is to conjure a long and vexed history. Over the last two hundred years, religion has often been wielded by the state to reform its incarcerated citizenry. In my academic research and activist work, I recast the categories of religion and incarceration and, most importantly, the relationship between the two.
Drawing on fieldwork with formerly incarcerated people and their families in Chicago, this presentation ethnographically traces the dynamic religious lifeworlds that these leaders are in the process of building amidst the structural challenges they confront daily and through the religious motifs they put to novel use. Through a careful analysis of their practices of everyday life, I examine how their work “to instill love for our people” has guided them not only to bring healing to the Chicago communities most burdened by incarceration, but also to mobilize community members (and sometimes entire congregations) to advance decarcerating policy change. By living religion at the intersection of individual and structural approaches to prison organizing, I argue that they are able to set their hands to transforming the very systems they once found inescapable, so that the next generation might be able to imagine a future beyond mass incarceration.
In this presentation, I aim to contribute most directly to the conference conversation on the challenges faced by activists seeking transformational alternatives to the U.S. prison system. By recovering religion as an integral and under-studied component of formerly incarcerated people’s movements today, I offer a focused study of how these dynamic models of religiously-based, community-led healing might offer viable alternatives for diverting resources and people away from the ever-expanding prison and reentry complexes.
People are more than the shackles that bind them; this is the truth of Exodus narratives. During... more People are more than the shackles that bind them; this is the truth of Exodus narratives. During the Great Migration, seven million people traded the southern landscape for the northern Promised Land. Today, more than seven million people are imprisoned, on probation or on parole. The similarities between slavery and imprisonment are striking, and the segregation laws under Jim Crow nearly parallel the policies formerly imprisoned people navigate today. However, marginalization through the prison system is only part of the story, just as legalized subordination was only part of the story for African Americans a century ago. Scholars of religion have illuminated the uniquely urban sacred order created by Southern transplants to Northern meccas, and, in so doing, have shown how migration itself was a salvific event, not just the result of socioeconomic push-pull factors. Our narrative of mass imprisonment has yet to take this consciously subjective turn:
to look beyond the stranglehold of prison policies towards the dynamism of prison diasporic communities, where many formerly incarcerated people are creating their own Promised Lands.
Drawing on fieldwork with formerly incarcerated leaders in Chicago, this paper ethnographically traces the worlds that our nation’s convicted felons have built after being granted the freedom to move upon release from prison. Several years ago, I began to call them ‘The Transcendent Third,’ a play on the often-quoted Bureau of Justice statistic that two-thirds of people will be rearrested within three years of their release from prison. But as I engaged these Chicago leaders in conversation about what it takes to be part of the one-third who are not rearrested, my alliteration conjured vivid narratives of border experiences that were at once ineffable and brutally real.
From rallying cries at South Side revolutionary podiums draped with red, black and green streamers to envelope-stuffing in the cafeterias of historic Bronzeville schools to panel presentations at the Nation of Islam’s annual Saviour’s Day Convention to ministry trainings at storefront churches that hide cascades of tongues behind ill-fitting doors, I will discuss how these formerly incarcerated leaders live across divisions as they work to testify to the intersubjective of communities where more than half of their young people are under the control of the criminal justice system or branded by criminal records. In so doing, I will demonstrate how they have been able to set their hands to transforming the very systems they once found inescapable, so that the next generation might be able to imagine a future beyond mass incarceration. Their dynamic tapestries of belief and practice embody a visionary hope for community wellbeing that redefines what it means to be black in the city – for themselves, their families and their ancestors.
By moving among written, visual and auditory sources, my research embraces their in-betweenness both methodologically and theoretically, holding the hands of God(s) many have felt on them as they moved through systems of confinement, the reach of criminal justice policies that threaten their permanent social exclusion, and the everyday experiences that blur the two.
Drawing on key Qur’anic concepts and intimate interviews with formerly incarcerated Black Muslim ... more Drawing on key Qur’anic concepts and intimate interviews with formerly incarcerated Black Muslim women living with HIV, this paper examines the strategies women are using to combat the collateral consequences of incarceration in their lives. A new reading of the verses in the Qur’an addressing substance use is offered to highlight how the socio-economic injustices these women move through impinge upon their abilities to fully live as believing women in American society. The structure and scope of incarceration itself stands in direct opposition to their mandate to live in responsibility to God, self and community.
But the stories of these women and women like them are often missing from the public discourse on incarceration, hidden in their broken neighborhoods, hidden in the prison cells that kept them captive for stretches of time. And while much has been written about the poverty and incarceration holding their communities in bondage, statistical attention to their social realities can inadvertently serve to further obscure their voices, treating them as a group rather than as a dynamic community of individuals struggling against the overlapping social forces that constrict their lives.
By bringing these women’s personal stories into conversation with their statistical realities and the faith that guides their lives, I will discuss the importance of theological analysis in a time of mass incarceration. Their self-developed theology of resilience and resistance demonstrates how, by living their faith, these women are able to challenge the structural forces marginalizing their lives, heal the toll that these forces have taken on their families, and rebuild their community infrastructure that has all but been destroyed by incarceration.
THURSDAY / NOVEMBER 5 / 6:00-8:00PM
20 COOPER SQUARE, 4TH FLOOR
The NYU Center for Religion and... more THURSDAY / NOVEMBER 5 / 6:00-8:00PM
20 COOPER SQUARE, 4TH FLOOR
The NYU Center for Religion and Media series on RELIGION AND VIOLENCE presents THEORY ON THE GROUND: Religion and spirituality, repressing and redeeming the struggles for justice. A conversation about how religion, race, gender, and sexuality intersect in the battle to resist state violence.
Discussants: NYLE FORT (Princeton University), DEON HAYWOOD (Women With A Vision, Inc.), JOSEF SORETT (Columbia University). Moderated by LAURA MCTIGHE (Columbia University).
ORGANIZED BY: THE CENTER FOR RELIGION AND MEDIA AT NYU
CO-SPONSORS: NYU PRISON EDUCATION PROGRAM AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES
FRIDAY / APRIL 10 / 3:30–6:30PM
JUROW LECTURE HALL, Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East
A... more FRIDAY / APRIL 10 / 3:30–6:30PM
JUROW LECTURE HALL, Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East
A public conversation about making, rather than doing, time and the critical and often misunderstood role religion plays in geographies of confinement and discipline, as well as in the everyday practices of incarcerated people. Presenters: Hakim ‘Ali (Reconstruction, Inc.),Tanya Erzen (University of Puget Sound), Robin McGinty (CUNY), and Angela Zito (NYU). Moderator:Laura McTighe (Columbia University).
ORGANIZED BY: THE CENTER FOR RELIGION AND MEDIA AT NYU
CO-SPONSORS: DEAN’S OFFICE, NYU COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCE; THE RELIGIOUS STUDIES PROGRAM
For thirty-five years, the New Orleans-based Black feminist collective Women With A Vision (WWAV)... more For thirty-five years, the New Orleans-based Black feminist collective Women With A Vision (WWAV) has fought for the liberation of their communities through reproductive justice, harm reduction, abolition feminism, racial justice, and sex workers' rights. In 2012, shortly after one of WWAV's biggest organizing victories, arsonists firebombed and destroyed its headquarters. Fire Dreams is an innovative collaboration between WWAV and Laura McTighe, who work in community to build a social movement ethnography of the organization’s post-arson rebirth. Rooting WWAV in the geography of the South and the living history of generations of Black feminist thinkers, McTighe and WWAV weave together stories from its founders’ pioneering work during the Black HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s and its groundbreaking organizing to end criminalization in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina---with other movements for liberation as accomplices. Together, the authors refuse the logics of racial capitalism and share WWAV’s own world-building knowledges, as well as their methods for living these Black feminist futures now. Fire Dreams is a vital toolkit for grassroots organizers, activist-scholars, and all those who dream to make the world otherwise.
People are more than the shackles that bind them; this is the truth of Exodus narratives. During ... more People are more than the shackles that bind them; this is the truth of Exodus narratives. During the Great Migration, seven million people traded the southern landscape for the northern Promised Land. Today, more than seven million people are imprisoned, on probation, or on parole. The continuities between slavery and imprisonment are undeniable, and segregation laws under Jim Crow nearly parallel the policies formerly imprisoned people navigate today. However, marginalization through the prison system is only part of the story, just as legalized subordination was only part of the story for black people a century ago. Scholars of religion have illuminated the uniquely urban sacred order created by southern transplants to northern meccas, and, in so doing, have shown how migration itself was a salvific event, not just the result of socioeconomic push-pull factors. Our narrative of religion in a time of mass criminalization must take this consciously liberatory turn: to refuse to yoke black life to the stranglehold of punitive punishment and to dwell instead in the complexities of being and being-together inside our prison nation, where currently and formerly imprisoned people and their families are building their own Promised Lands.
Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society , 2017
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the leaders of the quarter-century-old Women With A Vision (WWA... more In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the leaders of the quarter-century-old Women With A Vision (WWAV) collective launched a coordinated campaign to expose and challenge the criminalization of Black cisgender and transgender women working in New Orleans’ street-based economies. For the simple act of trading sex for money to survive, hundreds were convicted of a felony-level Crime Against Nature by Solicitation (CANS) and forced to register as sex offenders for periods of fifteen years to life. After five years of organizing, WWAV successfully overturned the statute, thereby securing the removal of more than 800 people from the Louisiana sex offender registry list. This article brings a fine-grained analysis to WWAV’s process of organizing against CANS in order to trace the making of this criminalization crisis and to clarify the terrain of the organization’s victory. It argues that WWAV organized through a distinct southern Black feminist tradition in order to disrupt the use of CANS as a technology of post-Katrina predatory policing. By refusing their erasure from the city of their birth, WWAV staff and participants not only rendered visible the mundane terror of targeted criminalization against Black women; they also opened new horizons for Black feminist struggle and collective liberation.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2018
Grounded in eighteen months of fieldwork and a decade of engaged partnership at Women With A Visi... more Grounded in eighteen months of fieldwork and a decade of engaged partnership at Women With A Vision (WWAV)—a black women’s health and social justice collective founded in 1989—this article explores the remaking of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina from the perspective of black feminist social life. By peeling back the histories of violence and struggle surrounding the storm, it reckons with what it means to build home and vision amid the everyday terror that resilience recovery efforts have wrought. Two questions frame this analysis: How have the gendered and racialized logics of resilience been spatialized? And how are the black feminist leaders of WWAV respatializing their city? To answer these questions, this article discusses key methods and practices of black feminist theory, locating authority and expertise over post-Katrina displacement and gendered violence with the black women working on the front lines. In so doing, it identifies and theorizes the resistant possibilities of the front porch as a critical site of black feminist practice for ending intimate, communal, and state violence. To be clear, the front porch here is not a metaphor. Southern front porches are deeply persistent black feminist geographies, made in the interstices through everyday practices of enduring. Porch talks, porch sits, and porch poses take place; they also exceed the space-time of the observer. In these ways, front porches are the grounds for not only for imagining a post-Katrina otherwise but also for realizing the New Orleans landscape anew.
Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis, Nov 2012
This article juxtaposes ethnographic fieldwork and archival research to explore the community-lev... more This article juxtaposes ethnographic fieldwork and archival research to explore the community-level systemic dislocation caused by mass incarceration, its historic and contemporary intersections with the domestic AIDS epidemic, and citizen movements to address these twin epidemics. To engage the fields of public health, critical prison studies and gender studies on questions of borders, vulnerability and social death, I take a community of HIV-positive formerly incarcerated activists in Philadelphia as my guides, and move with them as they work to repair the tenuous threads of communities neighborhood by neighborhood. I conclude that their process of community organizing holds the potential not only to dismantle the prison-created diaspora, but also to break the cages of fear and silence that permeate community experiences of injustice at the hands of the criminal justice and immigration systems.
International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, Jul 11, 2011
In the context of US urban jails, incarceration is often seen as an opportune intervention point ... more In the context of US urban jails, incarceration is often seen as an opportune intervention point for prevention interventions in public health. For the detained individual, it is an opportunity to reflect on individual choices and the potential for changes in one's life course. For population focused public health professionals, jail detention facilities represent a concentration of health risks, and an opportunity to have an impact on a significant portion of those at risk for HIV and other health concerns. This paper presents an innovative education and empowerment model that bridges across jail walls, beginning on the inside, and continuing on the outside of jail where individuals continue to be challenged and supported toward positive health and social choices. The intervention also seeks to foment community activism in the communities to which jail detainees return, thus aiming to have a structural impact. This paper examines both the intervention model and the challenges of examining the effectiveness claims for the intervention at multiple levels.
Islam and AIDS: Between Scorn, Pity and Justice, Feb 2009
In this study, I use the hermeneutics of Qur’anic liberation theology to reapproach the prohibiti... more In this study, I use the hermeneutics of Qur’anic liberation theology to reapproach the prohibition on alcohol use in a time of AIDS and mass incarceration in the United States. Through ethnographically-driven life histories with Philadelphia-based Black Muslim women who are formerly imprisoned and living with HIV, I pose new questions to the Qur’anic verses and the occasions for revelation, positing that the Qur’an itself directs us to the structural environment in which addiction arises, not to the individual culpability of believers who use substances.
Incarceration has become an epidemic in Louisiana. In this state of 4.6 million, one in eighty-si... more Incarceration has become an epidemic in Louisiana. In this state of 4.6 million, one in eighty-six adults are currently on lockdown, forcibly moved from their family homes to serve out decade-long sentences in rural plantation towns. While much ink has been spilled describing this system of racial expulsion, descriptive rehearsals of violence can naturalize our present order of human life, thereby entrenching the very brutalities they purport to oppose. In this paper, I blend ethnography and oral history to trace the geographies and histories that enabled New Orleans’ Women With A Vision to hold their community together in the prison capital of the world after an arson attack left them *place-less*. By centering questions of continuity, I bring into focus the spirit of black diasporic resistance that has guided WWAV’s two-decade-long program of mutual aid and social transformation, where collective histories of interrelatedness can take place and have a place.
Attempts to explain the American obsession with punishment have been beholden to two distinct gen... more Attempts to explain the American obsession with punishment have been beholden to two distinct genealogies: one a religious story of citizen reformation; the other material tale of capitalist accumulation. Neither, however, has adequately accounted for the *religious* roots of anti-black racism in the making of the carceral state. In this paper, I explore the criminalization of street-based sex work in Louisiana and the citizens’ movement for redress at New Orleans’ Women With A Vision. By blending ethnography and oral history with a careful analysis of court documents, police records and media articles, I argue that this heated “fight for women’s lives” not only opens new directions for understanding a religious genealogy of incarceration beyond the Quaker lineage of discipline and punish; it also provides scholars of North American Religions with a charge for revisiting the complex interplay between the religious underpinnings of state control and the spirit of grassroots transformation.
"There are two things that we Americans are particularly zealous about:
(1) Worshipping our Gods... more "There are two things that we Americans are particularly zealous about:
(1) Worshipping our Gods, and
(2) Punishing our criminals.
And these two things are not unrelated.
Without the commonsense religious assumptions about the relationship between crime and moral failure, between suffering and redemption, mass incarceration as we know it would likely be unthinkable and impracticable.
To get a handle on the religious underpinnings of our collective obsession with punishment, I’ve been working with formerly incarcerated elders and their families across the United States
for fifteen years – first as a grassroots activist, and now as an academic. AND I’ve been trying to understand how their religious ideas and practices can offer them such tremendous possibilities for imagining and generating more just ways of doing justice.
The breadth of this project is well beyond the scope of my presentation today, so I am going to focus on my work with formerly incarcerated Muslim women living with HIV in Philly..."
To speak of religion and incarceration in the U.S. is to conjure a long and vexed history. Over ... more To speak of religion and incarceration in the U.S. is to conjure a long and vexed history. Over the last two hundred years, religion has often been wielded by the state to reform its incarcerated citizenry. In my academic research and activist work, I recast the categories of religion and incarceration and, most importantly, the relationship between the two.
Drawing on fieldwork with formerly incarcerated people and their families in Chicago, this presentation ethnographically traces the dynamic religious lifeworlds that these leaders are in the process of building amidst the structural challenges they confront daily and through the religious motifs they put to novel use. Through a careful analysis of their practices of everyday life, I examine how their work “to instill love for our people” has guided them not only to bring healing to the Chicago communities most burdened by incarceration, but also to mobilize community members (and sometimes entire congregations) to advance decarcerating policy change. By living religion at the intersection of individual and structural approaches to prison organizing, I argue that they are able to set their hands to transforming the very systems they once found inescapable, so that the next generation might be able to imagine a future beyond mass incarceration.
In this presentation, I aim to contribute most directly to the conference conversation on the challenges faced by activists seeking transformational alternatives to the U.S. prison system. By recovering religion as an integral and under-studied component of formerly incarcerated people’s movements today, I offer a focused study of how these dynamic models of religiously-based, community-led healing might offer viable alternatives for diverting resources and people away from the ever-expanding prison and reentry complexes.
People are more than the shackles that bind them; this is the truth of Exodus narratives. During... more People are more than the shackles that bind them; this is the truth of Exodus narratives. During the Great Migration, seven million people traded the southern landscape for the northern Promised Land. Today, more than seven million people are imprisoned, on probation or on parole. The similarities between slavery and imprisonment are striking, and the segregation laws under Jim Crow nearly parallel the policies formerly imprisoned people navigate today. However, marginalization through the prison system is only part of the story, just as legalized subordination was only part of the story for African Americans a century ago. Scholars of religion have illuminated the uniquely urban sacred order created by Southern transplants to Northern meccas, and, in so doing, have shown how migration itself was a salvific event, not just the result of socioeconomic push-pull factors. Our narrative of mass imprisonment has yet to take this consciously subjective turn:
to look beyond the stranglehold of prison policies towards the dynamism of prison diasporic communities, where many formerly incarcerated people are creating their own Promised Lands.
Drawing on fieldwork with formerly incarcerated leaders in Chicago, this paper ethnographically traces the worlds that our nation’s convicted felons have built after being granted the freedom to move upon release from prison. Several years ago, I began to call them ‘The Transcendent Third,’ a play on the often-quoted Bureau of Justice statistic that two-thirds of people will be rearrested within three years of their release from prison. But as I engaged these Chicago leaders in conversation about what it takes to be part of the one-third who are not rearrested, my alliteration conjured vivid narratives of border experiences that were at once ineffable and brutally real.
From rallying cries at South Side revolutionary podiums draped with red, black and green streamers to envelope-stuffing in the cafeterias of historic Bronzeville schools to panel presentations at the Nation of Islam’s annual Saviour’s Day Convention to ministry trainings at storefront churches that hide cascades of tongues behind ill-fitting doors, I will discuss how these formerly incarcerated leaders live across divisions as they work to testify to the intersubjective of communities where more than half of their young people are under the control of the criminal justice system or branded by criminal records. In so doing, I will demonstrate how they have been able to set their hands to transforming the very systems they once found inescapable, so that the next generation might be able to imagine a future beyond mass incarceration. Their dynamic tapestries of belief and practice embody a visionary hope for community wellbeing that redefines what it means to be black in the city – for themselves, their families and their ancestors.
By moving among written, visual and auditory sources, my research embraces their in-betweenness both methodologically and theoretically, holding the hands of God(s) many have felt on them as they moved through systems of confinement, the reach of criminal justice policies that threaten their permanent social exclusion, and the everyday experiences that blur the two.
Drawing on key Qur’anic concepts and intimate interviews with formerly incarcerated Black Muslim ... more Drawing on key Qur’anic concepts and intimate interviews with formerly incarcerated Black Muslim women living with HIV, this paper examines the strategies women are using to combat the collateral consequences of incarceration in their lives. A new reading of the verses in the Qur’an addressing substance use is offered to highlight how the socio-economic injustices these women move through impinge upon their abilities to fully live as believing women in American society. The structure and scope of incarceration itself stands in direct opposition to their mandate to live in responsibility to God, self and community.
But the stories of these women and women like them are often missing from the public discourse on incarceration, hidden in their broken neighborhoods, hidden in the prison cells that kept them captive for stretches of time. And while much has been written about the poverty and incarceration holding their communities in bondage, statistical attention to their social realities can inadvertently serve to further obscure their voices, treating them as a group rather than as a dynamic community of individuals struggling against the overlapping social forces that constrict their lives.
By bringing these women’s personal stories into conversation with their statistical realities and the faith that guides their lives, I will discuss the importance of theological analysis in a time of mass incarceration. Their self-developed theology of resilience and resistance demonstrates how, by living their faith, these women are able to challenge the structural forces marginalizing their lives, heal the toll that these forces have taken on their families, and rebuild their community infrastructure that has all but been destroyed by incarceration.
THURSDAY / NOVEMBER 5 / 6:00-8:00PM
20 COOPER SQUARE, 4TH FLOOR
The NYU Center for Religion and... more THURSDAY / NOVEMBER 5 / 6:00-8:00PM
20 COOPER SQUARE, 4TH FLOOR
The NYU Center for Religion and Media series on RELIGION AND VIOLENCE presents THEORY ON THE GROUND: Religion and spirituality, repressing and redeeming the struggles for justice. A conversation about how religion, race, gender, and sexuality intersect in the battle to resist state violence.
Discussants: NYLE FORT (Princeton University), DEON HAYWOOD (Women With A Vision, Inc.), JOSEF SORETT (Columbia University). Moderated by LAURA MCTIGHE (Columbia University).
ORGANIZED BY: THE CENTER FOR RELIGION AND MEDIA AT NYU
CO-SPONSORS: NYU PRISON EDUCATION PROGRAM AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES
FRIDAY / APRIL 10 / 3:30–6:30PM
JUROW LECTURE HALL, Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East
A... more FRIDAY / APRIL 10 / 3:30–6:30PM
JUROW LECTURE HALL, Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East
A public conversation about making, rather than doing, time and the critical and often misunderstood role religion plays in geographies of confinement and discipline, as well as in the everyday practices of incarcerated people. Presenters: Hakim ‘Ali (Reconstruction, Inc.),Tanya Erzen (University of Puget Sound), Robin McGinty (CUNY), and Angela Zito (NYU). Moderator:Laura McTighe (Columbia University).
ORGANIZED BY: THE CENTER FOR RELIGION AND MEDIA AT NYU
CO-SPONSORS: DEAN’S OFFICE, NYU COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCE; THE RELIGIOUS STUDIES PROGRAM
On October 23-24, 2014, the Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbi... more On October 23-24, 2014, the Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University convened “Are the Gods Afraid of Black Sexuality? Religion and the Burdens of Black Sexual Politics.” The meetings for our two-day event were held in New York City, on the campus of Columbia University. An evening plenary on Thursday, October 23rd was hosted at First Corinthians Baptist Church in Harlem.
We are living through a moment of tremendous change at the intersection of race, religion, and sexuality, which has significant implications both for those who study and practice religion alike. “Are the Gods Afraid of Black Sexuality?” will bring scholars, activists and religious leaders together to explore a range of historical and contemporary phenomena associated with religion, race and sexuality, as they coalesce and converge. The task before us is not to address a single problem, but rather to unearth and engage with the often-unstated normative claims -- surrounding race and religion, gender and sex -- that continue to inform the work of scholars of (and the lives of people within) the US and the African Diaspora.
Topics to be addressed over the course of the two days will include: Religion, Media, Markets and the Making of Black Sexualities; Religious Narratives of Black Sexuality in the New World; The Religious Aesthetics/Cultural Politics of Black Sexuality; a Keynote Conversation on organizing for social change in the academy, through religious institutions, and in grassroots movements; Captive Bodies: The Sexual Politics of Policing Blackness; and Beyond the Burdens: Engendering the Sexual Futures of Black Religion. In addition to these more traditional panel-format presentations, we will also be holding a Public Conversation on The Sexual Politics of Black Sacred Music and a mini Film Festival.
The Institute of Religion, Culture, and Public Life is pleased to announce Fencing in God?, a sem... more The Institute of Religion, Culture, and Public Life is pleased to announce Fencing in God?, a semester-long series of events focused on the ways in which religion and mobility intersect with immigration and incarceration. Throughout the Spring 2013 term, we will be presenting three public lectures with scholars and activists and three related film-screenings, intended to facilitate and encourage long-term discussions around the topics of religion, immigration, and incarceration.
Event details for the series are below:
*Alyshia Galvez on Guadalupan New York: Activism and Devotion among Mexicans in NYC*
Tuesday, February 12th, 2013, 6-7:30 pm
Room 707, International Affairs Building 420 West 118th St, NY
Alyshia Gálvez is a cultural anthropologist (PhD, NYU 2004) whose work focuses on the efforts by Mexican immigrants in New York City to achieve the rights of citizenship. This talk asks: How do spaces of devotion become spaces of activism? What role does faith play in the construction of civic spaces and civil society among recent immigrant groups? What are the limitations of these forms of social mobilization? This talk will explore a decade of Guadalupan-based devotion and activism for immigration rights among recent Mexican immigrants in New York City. Based on Gálvez’s extended ethnographic research in New York City and many years of activism and advocacy, she will reflect on the changing immigrant rights movement and its intersection with faith based institutions and organizations.
*Religion and Incarceration: A conversation with Winnifred Sullivan and Julio Medina*
Thursday, March 14th, 2013, 6-8 pm
1501 IAB, 420 West 118th St
Featuring a conversation between Winnifred Sullivan and Julio Medina, this talk will focus on religious mobility within confined spaces, focusing on religious conversion within the American penal system. This conversation will not only explore the complexities of conversion within prisons, but also the ways in which religious faith -and activism- are integral components of the modern prison-industrial complex. Moderated by Brett Dignam, Clinical Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.
*Immigration Detention: Understanding the Intersections of Immigration and Incarceration*
Tuesday, April 16th, 2013, 6 pm- 8 pm
Room 1512, International Affairs Building 420 W 118th St,
Putting immigrant rights advocate Amy Gottlieb, scholar Douglas Thompkins, and journalist Jordan Flaherty in conversation, this round-table discussion focuses on the intersections of incarceration, immigration policies, and the practices of the carceral state. The panel discussion will be moderated by Rosemary Hicks, Visiting Scholar at the Bard Prison Initiative.
The history of religion is a history of movement. But what happens when religion is on the move? ... more The history of religion is a history of movement. But what happens when religion is on the move? Studies of religion and migration have often treated religion as a resource for people who are coping with the shock of displacement in a foreign world. In this conference, however, we are interested in examining how an interdisciplinary approach to migratory experiences might illuminate the dynamic interplay between the limited possibilities in which people find themselves and the capabilities they nonetheless possess for creating viable, even vibrant, forms of social life. By treating religion as an embodied and spatial phenomenon that intersects with political and economic structures in complex and often unexpected ways, this conference aims not only to contribute to the nascent field of religion and migration but also to deepen its theoretical and methodological repertoire for future studies.
This panel will explore how an interdisciplinary approach to migratory experiences in the African... more This panel will explore how an interdisciplinary approach to migratory experiences in the African diaspora — on United States soil, in the Caribbean, and across the Atlantic divide — might attune us to how mobility is not only an aspect of religious experience across traditions, times and spaces, but is also constitutive of religious beliefs, practices and communities. By treating religion as an embodied and spatial phenomenon that intersects with racial, gendered, political and economic structures in complex and often unexpected ways, this panel aims to broaden the our theoretical and methodological repertoire for future studies of religion in the African diaspora inclusive of movement, migration, missions and new media.
Panelists
1. Professor Randal Jelks, University of Kansas
2. Professor Lerone Martin, Eden Theological Seminary
3. Professor Frances Negron-Muntaner, Columbia University
4. Professor Carla Shedd, Columbia University
Moderator: Professor Josef Sorett, Columbia University
Co-Sponsors
Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER)
Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS)
Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL)
Religions of Harlem
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, May 23, 2020
“We should be able to live and thrive, not just survive.” With these words, the Black feminist le... more “We should be able to live and thrive, not just survive.” With these words, the Black feminist leaders of Women With A Vision (WWAV) in New Orleans refuse the religious and racist terror of post-Hurricane Katrina recovery—and theorize beyond the lethal logics that set their organizing home ablaze in a still-uninvestigated arson attack. This article approaches WWAV’s gauntlet as “theory on the ground”: theory developed in the midst of lived struggle, which carries forward the enduring resistant visions of generations past, and grows them in and through the geographies of the present, towards new and more livable futures. Drawing inspiration from Judith Weisenfeld’s study of religio-racial movements in New World A-Coming, this ethnography moves on the ground and in step with my comrades at WWAV to show how the spiritual work of building otherwise can transform both what we write (the content and theory of our scholarship) and how we write it (the methods and ethics of its undertaking). Centering WWAV’s world-building theory, learning from it, moving with it: this is essential decolonial academic praxis, which comes from and flows through a commitment to ending white supremacy and being an accomplice to Black liberation. In offering “theory on the ground” as both a model and an intervention, this article shows how ethnographers of religion, as well as those who use our tools and our texts, might study differently to build our field and our world otherwise.
The radical HIV prison activist movement has always been, in practice, an abolitionist movement. ... more The radical HIV prison activist movement has always been, in practice, an abolitionist movement. Set in Philadelphia in the early 2000s, this article centers the relationships through which leaders of ACT UP Philadelphia, the Philadelphia County Coalition for Prison Health Care, TEACH Outside, and Project UNSHACKLE worked to transform the social conditions for which prisons have been posited as the solution and to create a prison-free future in real time. Its pages unfold a three-part methodological toolkit for HIV prevention justice. First, harm reduction demands that one show up and provide relief, no questions asked. Second, mutual aid grounds the forging of new social relations that are more survivable than those produced by HIV stigma, mass criminalization, and organized abandonment. Third, transformative justice offers both a vision and a practice for challenging criminalization in all its intimate, communal, and structural forms, and building a racially just and strategic HIV...
A new activist group wants to force medical practices in prisons to meet national standards for t... more A new activist group wants to force medical practices in prisons to meet national standards for treatment and care, especially for hepatitis C and HIV.
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(1) Worshipping our Gods, and
(2) Punishing our criminals.
And these two things are not unrelated.
Without the commonsense religious assumptions about the relationship between crime and moral failure, between suffering and redemption, mass incarceration as we know it would likely be unthinkable and impracticable.
To get a handle on the religious underpinnings of our collective obsession with punishment, I’ve been working with formerly incarcerated elders and their families across the United States
for fifteen years – first as a grassroots activist, and now as an academic. AND I’ve been trying to understand how their religious ideas and practices can offer them such tremendous possibilities for imagining and generating more just ways of doing justice.
The breadth of this project is well beyond the scope of my presentation today, so I am going to focus on my work with formerly incarcerated Muslim women living with HIV in Philly..."
Drawing on fieldwork with formerly incarcerated people and their families in Chicago, this presentation ethnographically traces the dynamic religious lifeworlds that these leaders are in the process of building amidst the structural challenges they confront daily and through the religious motifs they put to novel use. Through a careful analysis of their practices of everyday life, I examine how their work “to instill love for our people” has guided them not only to bring healing to the Chicago communities most burdened by incarceration, but also to mobilize community members (and sometimes entire congregations) to advance decarcerating policy change. By living religion at the intersection of individual and structural approaches to prison organizing, I argue that they are able to set their hands to transforming the very systems they once found inescapable, so that the next generation might be able to imagine a future beyond mass incarceration.
In this presentation, I aim to contribute most directly to the conference conversation on the challenges faced by activists seeking transformational alternatives to the U.S. prison system. By recovering religion as an integral and under-studied component of formerly incarcerated people’s movements today, I offer a focused study of how these dynamic models of religiously-based, community-led healing might offer viable alternatives for diverting resources and people away from the ever-expanding prison and reentry complexes.
to look beyond the stranglehold of prison policies towards the dynamism of prison diasporic communities, where many formerly incarcerated people are creating their own Promised Lands.
Drawing on fieldwork with formerly incarcerated leaders in Chicago, this paper ethnographically traces the worlds that our nation’s convicted felons have built after being granted the freedom to move upon release from prison. Several years ago, I began to call them ‘The Transcendent Third,’ a play on the often-quoted Bureau of Justice statistic that two-thirds of people will be rearrested within three years of their release from prison. But as I engaged these Chicago leaders in conversation about what it takes to be part of the one-third who are not rearrested, my alliteration conjured vivid narratives of border experiences that were at once ineffable and brutally real.
From rallying cries at South Side revolutionary podiums draped with red, black and green streamers to envelope-stuffing in the cafeterias of historic Bronzeville schools to panel presentations at the Nation of Islam’s annual Saviour’s Day Convention to ministry trainings at storefront churches that hide cascades of tongues behind ill-fitting doors, I will discuss how these formerly incarcerated leaders live across divisions as they work to testify to the intersubjective of communities where more than half of their young people are under the control of the criminal justice system or branded by criminal records. In so doing, I will demonstrate how they have been able to set their hands to transforming the very systems they once found inescapable, so that the next generation might be able to imagine a future beyond mass incarceration. Their dynamic tapestries of belief and practice embody a visionary hope for community wellbeing that redefines what it means to be black in the city – for themselves, their families and their ancestors.
By moving among written, visual and auditory sources, my research embraces their in-betweenness both methodologically and theoretically, holding the hands of God(s) many have felt on them as they moved through systems of confinement, the reach of criminal justice policies that threaten their permanent social exclusion, and the everyday experiences that blur the two.
But the stories of these women and women like them are often missing from the public discourse on incarceration, hidden in their broken neighborhoods, hidden in the prison cells that kept them captive for stretches of time. And while much has been written about the poverty and incarceration holding their communities in bondage, statistical attention to their social realities can inadvertently serve to further obscure their voices, treating them as a group rather than as a dynamic community of individuals struggling against the overlapping social forces that constrict their lives.
By bringing these women’s personal stories into conversation with their statistical realities and the faith that guides their lives, I will discuss the importance of theological analysis in a time of mass incarceration. Their self-developed theology of resilience and resistance demonstrates how, by living their faith, these women are able to challenge the structural forces marginalizing their lives, heal the toll that these forces have taken on their families, and rebuild their community infrastructure that has all but been destroyed by incarceration.
20 COOPER SQUARE, 4TH FLOOR
The NYU Center for Religion and Media series on RELIGION AND VIOLENCE presents THEORY ON THE GROUND: Religion and spirituality, repressing and redeeming the struggles for justice. A conversation about how religion, race, gender, and sexuality intersect in the battle to resist state violence.
Discussants:
NYLE FORT (Princeton University),
DEON HAYWOOD (Women With A Vision, Inc.),
JOSEF SORETT (Columbia University).
Moderated by LAURA MCTIGHE (Columbia University).
ORGANIZED BY: THE CENTER FOR RELIGION AND MEDIA AT NYU
CO-SPONSORS: NYU PRISON EDUCATION PROGRAM AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES
Poster Artwork: “Study” by Pete Yahnke Railand
JUROW LECTURE HALL, Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East
A public conversation about making, rather than doing, time and the critical and often misunderstood role religion plays in geographies of confinement and discipline, as well as in the everyday practices of incarcerated people. Presenters: Hakim ‘Ali (Reconstruction, Inc.),Tanya Erzen (University of Puget Sound), Robin McGinty (CUNY), and Angela Zito (NYU). Moderator:Laura McTighe (Columbia University).
ORGANIZED BY: THE CENTER FOR RELIGION AND MEDIA AT NYU
CO-SPONSORS: DEAN’S OFFICE, NYU COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCE; THE RELIGIOUS STUDIES PROGRAM
(1) Worshipping our Gods, and
(2) Punishing our criminals.
And these two things are not unrelated.
Without the commonsense religious assumptions about the relationship between crime and moral failure, between suffering and redemption, mass incarceration as we know it would likely be unthinkable and impracticable.
To get a handle on the religious underpinnings of our collective obsession with punishment, I’ve been working with formerly incarcerated elders and their families across the United States
for fifteen years – first as a grassroots activist, and now as an academic. AND I’ve been trying to understand how their religious ideas and practices can offer them such tremendous possibilities for imagining and generating more just ways of doing justice.
The breadth of this project is well beyond the scope of my presentation today, so I am going to focus on my work with formerly incarcerated Muslim women living with HIV in Philly..."
Drawing on fieldwork with formerly incarcerated people and their families in Chicago, this presentation ethnographically traces the dynamic religious lifeworlds that these leaders are in the process of building amidst the structural challenges they confront daily and through the religious motifs they put to novel use. Through a careful analysis of their practices of everyday life, I examine how their work “to instill love for our people” has guided them not only to bring healing to the Chicago communities most burdened by incarceration, but also to mobilize community members (and sometimes entire congregations) to advance decarcerating policy change. By living religion at the intersection of individual and structural approaches to prison organizing, I argue that they are able to set their hands to transforming the very systems they once found inescapable, so that the next generation might be able to imagine a future beyond mass incarceration.
In this presentation, I aim to contribute most directly to the conference conversation on the challenges faced by activists seeking transformational alternatives to the U.S. prison system. By recovering religion as an integral and under-studied component of formerly incarcerated people’s movements today, I offer a focused study of how these dynamic models of religiously-based, community-led healing might offer viable alternatives for diverting resources and people away from the ever-expanding prison and reentry complexes.
to look beyond the stranglehold of prison policies towards the dynamism of prison diasporic communities, where many formerly incarcerated people are creating their own Promised Lands.
Drawing on fieldwork with formerly incarcerated leaders in Chicago, this paper ethnographically traces the worlds that our nation’s convicted felons have built after being granted the freedom to move upon release from prison. Several years ago, I began to call them ‘The Transcendent Third,’ a play on the often-quoted Bureau of Justice statistic that two-thirds of people will be rearrested within three years of their release from prison. But as I engaged these Chicago leaders in conversation about what it takes to be part of the one-third who are not rearrested, my alliteration conjured vivid narratives of border experiences that were at once ineffable and brutally real.
From rallying cries at South Side revolutionary podiums draped with red, black and green streamers to envelope-stuffing in the cafeterias of historic Bronzeville schools to panel presentations at the Nation of Islam’s annual Saviour’s Day Convention to ministry trainings at storefront churches that hide cascades of tongues behind ill-fitting doors, I will discuss how these formerly incarcerated leaders live across divisions as they work to testify to the intersubjective of communities where more than half of their young people are under the control of the criminal justice system or branded by criminal records. In so doing, I will demonstrate how they have been able to set their hands to transforming the very systems they once found inescapable, so that the next generation might be able to imagine a future beyond mass incarceration. Their dynamic tapestries of belief and practice embody a visionary hope for community wellbeing that redefines what it means to be black in the city – for themselves, their families and their ancestors.
By moving among written, visual and auditory sources, my research embraces their in-betweenness both methodologically and theoretically, holding the hands of God(s) many have felt on them as they moved through systems of confinement, the reach of criminal justice policies that threaten their permanent social exclusion, and the everyday experiences that blur the two.
But the stories of these women and women like them are often missing from the public discourse on incarceration, hidden in their broken neighborhoods, hidden in the prison cells that kept them captive for stretches of time. And while much has been written about the poverty and incarceration holding their communities in bondage, statistical attention to their social realities can inadvertently serve to further obscure their voices, treating them as a group rather than as a dynamic community of individuals struggling against the overlapping social forces that constrict their lives.
By bringing these women’s personal stories into conversation with their statistical realities and the faith that guides their lives, I will discuss the importance of theological analysis in a time of mass incarceration. Their self-developed theology of resilience and resistance demonstrates how, by living their faith, these women are able to challenge the structural forces marginalizing their lives, heal the toll that these forces have taken on their families, and rebuild their community infrastructure that has all but been destroyed by incarceration.
20 COOPER SQUARE, 4TH FLOOR
The NYU Center for Religion and Media series on RELIGION AND VIOLENCE presents THEORY ON THE GROUND: Religion and spirituality, repressing and redeeming the struggles for justice. A conversation about how religion, race, gender, and sexuality intersect in the battle to resist state violence.
Discussants:
NYLE FORT (Princeton University),
DEON HAYWOOD (Women With A Vision, Inc.),
JOSEF SORETT (Columbia University).
Moderated by LAURA MCTIGHE (Columbia University).
ORGANIZED BY: THE CENTER FOR RELIGION AND MEDIA AT NYU
CO-SPONSORS: NYU PRISON EDUCATION PROGRAM AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES
Poster Artwork: “Study” by Pete Yahnke Railand
JUROW LECTURE HALL, Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East
A public conversation about making, rather than doing, time and the critical and often misunderstood role religion plays in geographies of confinement and discipline, as well as in the everyday practices of incarcerated people. Presenters: Hakim ‘Ali (Reconstruction, Inc.),Tanya Erzen (University of Puget Sound), Robin McGinty (CUNY), and Angela Zito (NYU). Moderator:Laura McTighe (Columbia University).
ORGANIZED BY: THE CENTER FOR RELIGION AND MEDIA AT NYU
CO-SPONSORS: DEAN’S OFFICE, NYU COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCE; THE RELIGIOUS STUDIES PROGRAM
We are living through a moment of tremendous change at the intersection of race, religion, and sexuality, which has significant implications both for those who study and practice religion alike. “Are the Gods Afraid of Black Sexuality?” will bring scholars, activists and religious leaders together to explore a range of historical and contemporary phenomena associated with religion, race and sexuality, as they coalesce and converge. The task before us is not to address a single problem, but rather to unearth and engage with the often-unstated normative claims -- surrounding race and religion, gender and sex -- that continue to inform the work of scholars of (and the lives of people within) the US and the African Diaspora.
Topics to be addressed over the course of the two days will include: Religion, Media, Markets and the Making of Black Sexualities; Religious Narratives of Black Sexuality in the New World; The Religious Aesthetics/Cultural Politics of Black Sexuality; a Keynote Conversation on organizing for social change in the academy, through religious institutions, and in grassroots movements; Captive Bodies: The Sexual Politics of Policing Blackness; and Beyond the Burdens: Engendering the Sexual Futures of Black Religion. In addition to these more traditional panel-format presentations, we will also be holding a Public Conversation on The Sexual Politics of Black Sacred Music and a mini Film Festival.
Event details for the series are below:
*Alyshia Galvez on Guadalupan New York: Activism and Devotion among Mexicans in NYC*
Tuesday, February 12th, 2013, 6-7:30 pm
Room 707, International Affairs Building 420 West 118th St, NY
Alyshia Gálvez is a cultural anthropologist (PhD, NYU 2004) whose work focuses on the efforts by Mexican immigrants in New York City to achieve the rights of citizenship. This talk asks: How do spaces of devotion become spaces of activism? What role does faith play in the construction of civic spaces and civil society among recent immigrant groups? What are the limitations of these forms of social mobilization? This talk will explore a decade of Guadalupan-based devotion and activism for immigration rights among recent Mexican immigrants in New York City. Based on Gálvez’s extended ethnographic research in New York City and many years of activism and advocacy, she will reflect on the changing immigrant rights movement and its intersection with faith based institutions and organizations.
*Religion and Incarceration: A conversation with Winnifred Sullivan and Julio Medina*
Thursday, March 14th, 2013, 6-8 pm
1501 IAB, 420 West 118th St
Featuring a conversation between Winnifred Sullivan and Julio Medina, this talk will focus on religious mobility within confined spaces, focusing on religious conversion within the American penal system. This conversation will not only explore the complexities of conversion within prisons, but also the ways in which religious faith -and activism- are integral components of the modern prison-industrial complex. Moderated by Brett Dignam, Clinical Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.
*Immigration Detention: Understanding the Intersections of Immigration and Incarceration*
Tuesday, April 16th, 2013, 6 pm- 8 pm
Room 1512, International Affairs Building 420 W 118th St,
Putting immigrant rights advocate Amy Gottlieb, scholar Douglas Thompkins, and journalist Jordan Flaherty in conversation, this round-table discussion focuses on the intersections of incarceration, immigration policies, and the practices of the carceral state. The panel discussion will be moderated by Rosemary Hicks, Visiting Scholar at the Bard Prison Initiative.
Panelists
1. Professor Randal Jelks, University of Kansas
2. Professor Lerone Martin, Eden Theological Seminary
3. Professor Frances Negron-Muntaner, Columbia University
4. Professor Carla Shedd, Columbia University
Moderator: Professor Josef Sorett, Columbia University
Co-Sponsors
Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER)
Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS)
Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL)
Religions of Harlem