Conversation Partners

Zainal Abidin Bagir teaches at the Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies, Graduate School of Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia and a board member of the Indonesian Consortium for Inter-religious Studies, Yogyakarta. His two main interests relate to the issue of democratic management of religious diversity and religion and science, with increasingly more focus on ecology. His recent publications include a chapter on governance of religions in the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Indonesia (2018) and a contribution on Islam and ecology in the Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology (2017). (Note that Dr Bagir will not be able to attend AAR in person an will be participating in the panel online)

Whitney Bauman is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Florida International University. His works include, Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic(Columbia University Press 2014), and co-edited with Lisa Stenmark, Unsettling Science and Religion: Contributions and Questions from Queer Studies(Lexington 2018).

Ali Lutz is a PhD candidate at Vanderbilt University in the Department of Religion focusing on Ethics and Society. Ali's doctoral research explores the ethical assumptions that drive humanitarian efforts, in particular the issues of control and imbalances of power that beset many well-intentioned efforts to relieve global poverty. Her work engages Latin American liberation theology and decolonial thought to critique humanitarian power and to challenge the Western coloniality of being in global humanitarianism. She asks how to guide the moral formation of humanitarians without reproducing dynamics of dominance. This project grows out of Ali's extensive experience living in rural Haiti as a humanitarian worker with Partners In Health.

Eduardo Mendieta is professor of philosophy, associate director of the Rock Ethics Institute, affiliated faculty at the School of International Affairs, and the Bioethics Program at Penn State University. He is the author of The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) and Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory (SUNY Press, 2007). He is also co-editor with Jonathan VanAntwerpen ofThe Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (Columbia University Press, 2011), and with Craig Calhoun and Jonathan VanAntwerpen of Habermas and Religion (Polity, 2013), and with Stuart Elden of Reading Kant’s Geography (SUNY Press, 2011). Most recently, he co-edited with Amy Allen, From Alienation to Forms of Life: The Critical Theory of Rahel Jaeggi (Penn State University Press, 2018), and the Cambridge Habermas Lexicon(Cambridge University Press, 2019).(Note that Dr Bagir will not be able to attend AAR in person)

Dr Elaine Nogueira-Godsey is an Assistant Professor of Theology, Ecology and Race at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio. Her research focuses on the development of ecological ethics and decolonial methods of research and teaching in relation to the study of religion and theology. It makes use of postcolonial theory to research the relationships between Ecology, Gender, Race and Religion, with a focus on Third-World contexts. Her most recently published works, “Towards a Decological Pedagogy” as well as “Tangible Actions Toward Solidarity: An Ecofeminist Analysis of Women's Participation in Food Justice.” She is currently working on her book titled “The Ecofeminism of Ivone Gebara.” Dr Nogueira-Godsey holds a doctorate in religious studies from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa. She also received a fellowship for postdoctoral study from UCT in religion and education and another postdoctoral fellowship from the University of Johannesburg studying the intersection of ecofeminism and postcolonial theory. She is a board member of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture(ISSRNC), an Assistant Editor for the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture(JSRNC) and co-chair of the Women’s Caucus AAR/SBL.

Josh Reeves is assistant professor of science and religion in the philosophy department at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of “Against Methodology in Science and Religion” (Routledge, 2018).

Lisa Stenmark teaches Humanities and Comparative Religious Studies at San Jose State University. She is the author of Religion, Science and Democracy: A Disputational Friendship, on scientific and religious authority in public life, and co-editor, with Whitney Bauman, of Unsettling Science and Religion: Contributions and Questions from Queer Studies, and series co-editor, also with Whitney Bauman, of Religion and Science as a Critical Discourse. She earned an MDiv/MA from Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary/ the Graduate Theological Union, and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Vanderbilt University.