April 24 Monday, 4:30pm | Oakley Center Tao Jiang is Professor of Classical Chinese Philosophy and Mahāyāna Buddhist Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He is the author of Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Contexts and Dialogue: Yogācāra Buddhism and Modern Psychology on the Subliminal Mind (University of Hawaii Press, 2006), as well as the co-editor of The Reception and Rendition of Freud in China (Routledge, 2013). Jiang chairs the Department of Religion at Rutgers and directs the Rutgers Center for Chinese Studies. RSVP here to join the conversation. Continue reading »

April 19 Wednesday,4:30pm | Oakley Center How does political agency surface and transpire in constrained settings? With what effects? In his new book, States of Subsistence, José Ciro Martinez examines a set of actions through which bakers manipulate regulations that seek to organize how they provide subsidized bread. Building on eighteen months of fieldwork conducted in Jordan, twelve of which were spent working as a baker, Martínez unpacks how ordinary citizens confound classificatory grids and regulatory strategies while establishing alternative modes of togetherness that make precarity liveable. Foregrounding these compromised practices allows for an exploration of how Jordanians appropriate public resources and refashion their lives amidst the oppressive logics that pervade everyday life. And all while being entangled with the state—subversively, creatively, but inescapably. RSVP here to join the conversation. Continue reading »

April 13 Thursday, 4:30pm | Oakley Center Zine Magubane is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences at Boston College. It is largely due to the work of Robert A. Nisbet, author of the canon-defining text, The Sociological Tradition, that sociologists now take it as axiomatic that our discipline is an invention of the French Revolution. It was from the French Revolution that Nisbet derived the five “unit ideas” (community, authority, status, the sacred, and alienation) and their antitheses (society, power, economic class, the secular, and progress) that were to be the foundation of sociology’s conceptual and analytical framework. In so doing he sought to accomplish two aims: to make sociology “a field in and for itself” and to “rescue American sociology from insularity and ethnocentrism.” Admirable goals, indeed. However, Nisbet’s efforts to give sociology “a new awareness of the world as a whole” did not extend beyond Europe. For him, the “broadening and enriching” of American sociology was tantamount to “the Europeanizing of American sociology.” Join us for a discussion with Zine Magubane, Associate Professor of Sociology in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences at Boston College, to discuss how the ‘Africanizing’ of sociology (and the French Revolution) opens up far more possibilities to broaden, deepen, and enrich our discipline. RSVP here to join the conversation. Continue reading »

April 4 Tuesday, 4:30pm | Online In the U.S., people of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) descent are counted as White and do not hold minoritized status, a federal statistical policy that is currently under review. But even when not officially sanctioned by the state, grassroots ideas about race/ethnicity categories can be a powerful force in their social construction and transformation. In her 2017 book The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Stanford University Press), Neda Maghbouleh drew on ethnography, life history interviews, and archival materials to show how an invisibilized MENA community relates to prevailing American race/ethnicity standards. In the years since, she has published a series of papers that tested humanistic insights from Limits of Whiteness using quantitative methods. Each approach has enabled a different set of scholarly and social impacts, illuminating possible answers to the MENA question—and the promises and challenges of transdisciplinary work more generally. Continue reading »

March 13 Monday, 4:30pm | Oakley Center Winnifred Fallers Sullivan JD, PhD, University of Chicago, is Provost Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Director of the Center for Religion and the Human at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is also an Affiliated Professor of Law at the Maurer School of Law. She studies the intersection of religion and law in the modern period, particularly the phenomenology of modern religion as it is shaped in its encounter with law. Among other publications, Sullivan is the author of The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton, 2005, 2d ed. 2018), Prison Religion: Faith-based Reform and the Constitution (Princeton, 2009), A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care and the Law (Chicago, 2014), and Church State Corporation: Construing Religion in US Law (Chicago, 2020), coauthor of Ekklesia: Three Studies in Church and State (Chicago, 2018) and The Abyss or Life is Simple (Chicago 2022), and coeditor of Politics of Religious Freedom (Chicago, 2015) and At Home and Abroad: The Politics of American Religion (Columbia 2021). Continue reading »

March 7 Tuesday, 4:30pm | akley Center Neomi De Anda, is a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Dayton Department of Religious Studies. She teaches courses in religion, languages and cultures, Latinx and Latin American studies, race and ethnic studies, and women and gender studies. She is a Human Rights Center Research Associate.  She holds a Ph.D. in Constructive Theology from Loyola University Chicago.  She also has master’s degrees in Theology (Oblate School of Theology) and Educational Leadership (St. Mary’s University, San Antonio). Dr. De Anda has scholarly presentations, publications and exhibitions on her research interests of LatinoXa Christology; theology and breast milk; chisme; the intersection of race and migrations in conjunction with the Marianist Social Justice Collaborative Immigrant Justice Team; and a border theology at the intersections of the environment, migrations, labor, and women.  Continue reading »

February 27 Monday, 4:30pm | Online Heba Gowayed is the Moorman-Simon Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University. Her research, which is global and comparative, examines how low-income people traverse social services, immigration laws, and their associated bureaucracies, while grappling with gender and racial inequalities. RSVP here to join the conversation. Continue reading »

November 15 Tuesday, 6:00pm | Online Frank B. Wilderson, III, an award-winning writer, poet, scholar, activist and Chancellor Professor at UC-Irvine, worked with the ANC during the apartheid era. Selamawit D. Terrefe, Assistant Professor in English at Tulane Univ., and Mellon Just Futures Fellow and visiting faculty at Williams College, specializes in Global Black Studies, Gender/Sexuality, Psychoanalysis, Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory. Joy James, political philosopher and author, is Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Humanities at Williams College. *The concept for this discussion sponsored by the Williams Just Futures Mellon Project and the Oakley Center originated with Black doctoral students/postdocs immersed in the possibilities of organizing and resistance against repression. Continue reading »