Apr. 25, Discussion on “Migrant Imaginaries: Religion on the Move in the African Diaspora,” USA

The opening conversation for the 2013 Religion Graduate Students Association Conference will be on “Migrant Imaginaries: Religion on the Move in the African Diaspora” and it will be held Thursday, April 25th, 2013, 4-6 pm, 509 Knox Hall, Columbia University, New York, USA.

The history of religion in the African diaspora is a history of movement.  But what happens when religion is on the move?  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 theoretical and methodological repertoire for future studies of religion in the African diaspora inclusive of movement, migration, missions and new media.

Moderator: Josef Sorett, Columbia University
Panelists: Randall Jelks (Kansas University); Lerone Martin (Eden Theological Seminary); Frances Negrón-Muntaner (Columbia University); Carla Shedd (Columbia University).
Co-sponsored by  Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL), Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER), Institute for Religion in African American Studies (IRAAS), Religions of Harlem Project.

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