Invited sessions

Sophie Bjork-James is an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Anthropology Department at Vanderbilt University. She has over ten years’ experience researching both the US-based Religious Right and the white nationalist movements. She is the co-editor of Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism (West Virginia University Press, 2020). She is the author of The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family (Rutgers University Press, 2021) which provides an ethnographic account of how a theology of the family came to dominate a white evangelical tradition in the post-Civil Rights movement United States, providing a theological corollary to Religious Right politics. She is currently developing two projects. One explores anti-racist strategies challenging the white nationalist movement in the Northwestern United States. The other project explores contemporary pro-life activism and the intersection of abortion politics and environmental politics.

Her work has appeared in American Anthropologist, Oxford Bibliographies, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Feminist Anthropology, and Transforming Anthropology. Her work has been featured on the NBC Nightly News, NPR’s All Things Considered, BBC Radio 4’s Today, and in the New York Times. She has published op-eds in the LA Times, Religious Dispatches, and the Conversation.

Selected work:

Sophie Bjork-James, The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family. Rutgers University Press, 2021.

Sophie Bjork-James, “White Sexual Politics: The Patriarchal Family in White Nationalism and the Religious Right,” Transforming Anthropology, 28.1 (2020): 58-73.

Sophie Bjork-James, “Americanism, Trump, and Uniting the White Right,” in Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism, eds. Jeff Maskovsky and Sophie Bjork-James, West Virginia University Press, 42-60 (2020).

Rachel C. Schneider is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Rice University's Religion and Public Life Program (RPLP). Schneider’s research examines how religion undergirds systems of oppression, particularly white supremacy, but also how religion and spirituality shape ethical and political practice and inspire social change. She is especially interested in how white Christians in South Africa and the United States engage with race, as well as the role of religion in quests for social justice, racial equity, and human flourishing. Her current book project Christianity, Whiteness, and the Quest for a New South Africa is an ethnographic examination of how progressive white Christians living in Johannesburg engage with racial inequality and calls for racial redress.

Working at the intersections of religious studies, anthropology, and sociology, Schneider’s work has been published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Religions, and the Journal of Religious Ethics, as well as the edited collection Millennials, the Emerging Church, and Religion..

Selected work:

Rachel C Schneider and Sophie Bjork-James. 2020. Whither Whiteness and Religion?: Implications for Theology and the Study of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 88, Issue 1, March 2020, Pages 175–199, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfaa002

Schneider, Rachel C. 2020. White Urban Immersion, Intersubjectivity, and an Ethics of Care in South Africa, Journal of Religious Ethics, 48: 620-641. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jore.12331?af=R

Schneider, Rachel C. 2018. “’A Web of Subversive Friends’: New Monasticism in the United States and South Africa" Religions 9, no. 6: 184. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel9060184

Mohamad Jarada is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He received a B.A. in anthropology at Berkeley and a M.T.S. in philosophy and theology at Harvard Divinity School. Mohamad’s research concerns Islam and Muslims in the United States. In particular, he focuses on how the Islamic tradition, its sciences and jurisprudence, are made intelligible and reinterpreted when confronted with legal, political, and social forces that are inimical to its development and transmission. His research has been funded and recognized by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Ford Foundation, Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and other granting units across the University of California, Berkeley.

Sharmin Sadequee is a cultural anthropologist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion and Public Life at the University of Alberta. As an anthropologist, her broader research interests include understanding how religion as a complex social and cultural phenomenon interacts with modern political, legal, scientific, and civil society social movements. In this regard, her recent research deals with the way state agencies, court litigations, and government actors regulate Islam and Muslim communities, and the way Muslims address such governmental management and the broader anti-Muslim racism through civil society human rights and social justice campaigns in the US secular, settler-colonial state. Some of her published work appear in The Journal of Surveillance and Society, The Maydan, Anthropology Now, and The Center for Global Muslim Life (formerly Ummah Wide).

Nalika Gajaweera is a research anthropologist at the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California. Her specializations are in the anthropology of religion, with a specific interest in the intersections of Buddhism, race, ethno-nationalism and gender. She has studied these issues most in-depth in the context of Sri Lanka and the United States. Her current project focuses on documenting the struggles, experiences and practices of ethnic and racial minority leadership within North-American meditation-based insight institutions, and their efforts to confront issues of race, racism and whiteness within these institutions. Transforming the America Sangha, or TAS, is a three-year research initiative supported by the Kataly Foundation.

Gajaweera earned her M.A and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine. Her doctoral research examined how Buddhist ethics and practices of giving shaped Sri Lankan local NGOs doing humanitarianism work in the context of two disasters: the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka that ended in 2009. Prior to graduate school, Gajaweera was a Fulbright Fellow in India and a recipient of the Richter International Fellowship to the UK. She received her B.A from Occidental College.She has consulted international aid agencies on issues of Buddhism, ethno-religious violence and religious pluralism in Sri Lanka. Her teaching interests are religion and humanitarianism, anthropology of Buddhism, and spirituality and resilience.

Selected work:

Nalika Gajaweera, The Mothers of the Righteous Society: Lay Buddhist Women as Agents of the Sinhala Nationalist Imaginary, Journal of Global Buddhism, 2020.

Elina I. Hartikainen is an Academy Research Fellow (funded by the Academy of Finland) in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research examines the intersection of religion, race, politics and law in Brazil through a focus on Afro-Brazilian religions. In her past and current research, she has explored this conjuncture through the analysis of the Candomblé religion’s practitioners’ activist engagements with Brazilian state projects of participatory democracy and multiculturalism in Salvador, Brazil. Her current Academy of Finland-funded research examines the impact of the wide-spread adoption of “multicultural legal instruments” on the legal treatment of religious violence against Afro-Brazilian religions in Brazil. Theoretically and methodologically, her research draws on a combination of sociocultural and linguistic anthropological approaches to political and legal processes.

Selected work:

Hartikainen, Elina. 2020. Religion, Law, and Bolsonaro’s Decree on Essential Services. Cultural Anthropology Covid-19, Fieldsights, May 12.

Hartikainen, Elina. 2019. Adjudicating Religious Intolerance: Afro-Brazilian Religions, Public Space and the National Collective in Twenty-First-Century Brazil. Religion and Society: Advances in Research 10: 92-110.

Hartikainen, Elina. 2019. Candomblé and the Academic’s Tools: Religious Expertise and the Binds of Recognition in Brazil.American Anthropologist 121 (4): 815-829.

Hartikainen, Elina. 2018. A Politics of Respect: Reconfiguring Democracy in Afro-Brazilian Religious Activism. American Ethnologist 45(1):87-99.

Hartikainen, Elina. 2017. Chronotopic Realignments and the Shifting Semiotics and Politics of Visibility in Brazilian Candomblé Activism Candomblé Activism. Signs and Society 5 (2): 356-389.

Lea Taragin-Zeller is a postdoctoral researcher at the Woolf Institute (Cambridge, UK) and the Faculty of Education in Science and Technology at the Technion Institute of Technology (Haifa, Israel). This fall she will be joining the faculty of Hebrew University of Jerusalem as lecturer in Culture Studies and Public Policy. Lea’s work has been published (or forthcoming) in leading journals, such as American Anthropologist and Medical Anthropology. Lea co-convenes a new seminar series “ Religion, Race and Racism: Transnational Conversations”, jointly hosted by the Woolf Institute, UCL Social Research Unit and the University of Cambridge.

Her current research project “Religious Sisterhood: Encounters of Gender, Religion and Belonging in the UK” offers an ethnographic account of how Jewish and Muslim women forge alliances to fight racism and xenophobia amidst a nationalist turn in Britain, a trend observed more broadly in Europe and North America.

You can learn more about her work here, or follow her on Twitter @leataragin

Heather Mellquist Lehto is a cultural anthropologist whose work attends to the intersections of technology, religion, and kinship in South Korea and the United States. She is a postdoctoral research fellow on an interdisciplinary research project Beyond Secularization: Religion, Science, and Technology in Public Life at Arizona State University. Her research has received funding from the Fulbright-Hays fellowship, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Korea Foundation, the Academy for Korean Studies, and the Templeton Religion Trust. Her written work has been published in academic journals including the Journal of Korean Studies, Religion and Society, American Religion, and Acta Koreana, and her audio ethnographic research has been featured on the international public radio program PRI's The World. Twitter: @mellquistlehto

Select public-facing work:

https://www.pri.org/people/heather-mellquist-lehto

https://www.humanstories.ca/blog/coming-up-on-april-12-heather-mellquist-lehto-korean-multisite-churches

http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/coronavirus-cults-contagion-south-korea/

Caitlin Zaloom is a cultural anthropologist and Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University. Her latest book, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost, explores how the financial pressures of paying for college shape U.S. middle-class families. Zaloom is also author of Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London, editor in Chief of Public Books, and co-editor of the recent volumes Think in Public and Antidemocracy in America. Zaloom’s work has been featured in outlets including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, NPR, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Times Higher Education. Twitter: @caitlinzaloom

Select public-facing work:

https://www.publicbooks.org/public-thinker-hua-hsu-on-reading-until-you-see-double/

https://www-nytimes-com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/2019/08/30/opinion/sunday/college-tuition.html

https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-future-of-tenure#zaloom

Girish Daswani’s research interests include religion, morality and ethics, transnationalism, corruption and activism. His first book examines the ethical dimensions of Pentecostalism in shaping the collective aspirations and individual lives of church members in Ghana and London. Girish’s most recent scholarly work has been exploring different activist, artistic and religious responses to political corruption. He is currently working on a book manuscript about the intersections of post/colonialism and activism in Ghana. His most recent public-facing work has been exploring the ways in which imperialism, colonialism, and Orientalism have impacted (and are still impacting) popular politics and the field of Anthropology.

Select public-facing work:

“Teaching Orientalism through Art Practice: ‘Othered’. The Virtual Exhibit”. Everyday Orientalism, April 2020 [with Katherine Blouin].

“Ghana’s National Cathedral: Chale, what’s up with that?”. Africa Proactive, November 2019.

“On the Whiteness of Anthropology – Sur la blanchité de l’anthropologie”. Everyday Orientalism, July 2019.

“Decolonizing the Classroom: A Conversation with Girish Daswani”. By Sarah O’Sullivan. Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2019.

Matthew Engelke is a professor in the Department of Religion and director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University. He is the author of, most recently, How to Think Like an Anthropologist (Princeton UP, 2018). A section editor for Anthropology and Religion at Public Books, he is also the editor of Prickly Paradigm Press and consulting editor for a new series on anthropology at Penguin Random House UK.

Select public-facing work:

https://www.theguardian.com/profile/matthew-engelke

https://www.publicbooks.org/author/matthew-engelke/

Candace Lukasik is an anthropologist of religion, race, and migration, with a focus on Middle Eastern Christianity, U.S. geopolitics, and Muslim-Christian relations. Her book manuscript, Economy of Blood: Coptic Christianity and the Persecution Politics of U.S. Empire, examines how American politicization of Middle Eastern Christians has impacted inter-communal solidarities and religious alliances, both in the Middle East and in diaspora. She is a curator for New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity, and a cohort member in the American Examples 2021 program as well as Fordham University’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center project on Orthodoxy and Human Rights.

Select public-facing work:

https://publicorthodoxy.org/2018/08/27/modernity-murder-and-coptic-identity/

https://egyptmigrations.com/2017/06/25/land-migration-and-memory/

https://www.orientalorthodoxsolidarity.org

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctIi3SzCvL0&t=187s

https://timep.org/commentary/analysis/copts-church-and-state-egypts-christians-frustrated-with-lack-of-protection/

Sarah Riccardi-Swartz is a postdoctoral fellow in the Luce-Funding Recovering Truth: Religion, Journalism, and Democracy in a Post-Truth Era project in the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University. An anthropologist, scholar of American religion, and trained documentary filmmaker, she specializes in social politics, media, and Orthodox Christianity. Her research has been funded by New York University, the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, the Louisville Institute, a Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fordham University (in partnership with Luce and Leadership 100), and a Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal fellowship from the Social Science Research Council.

Select public-facing work:

https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/articles/putins-american-comrades-and-our-post-truth-moment

https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/american-conversions-to-russian-orthodoxy-amid-the-global-culture-wars

https://religiondispatches.org/after-orthodox-priest-suspended-for-stop-the-steal-activity-a-renewed-spotlight-on-the-orthodox-far-right/

https://americanethnologist.org/features/reflections/fieldwork-and-fallout-with-the-far-right

https://soundcloud.com/user-165148002/the-truth-divide-grows-violent

https://anchor.fm/notesfromthefield

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/storiesfromthearchive/348695337