Conveners: Lori Beaman, Daniel Jones, Lois Ann Lorentzen, Kemy Oyarzún, Ann Pellegrini, Pablo Federico Semán, Juan Marco Vaggione, Melissa Wilcox
This teach-in brings together participants from a multi-year initiative on Religion and Politics in the Americas to examine the ways in which “religion” has become a key node in interactions between bodies, populations, and neoliberal governance throughout the Americas.
Biographies
Lori G. Beaman, Ph.D. is the Canada Research Chair in the Contextualization of Religion in a Diverse Canada, Director of the Religion and Diversity Project and Professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her publications include “Just Work it Out Amongst Your Selves: The Implications of the Private Mediation of Religious Freedom,” Citizenship Studies (2012).
Daniel Jones researcher at the Argentinean National Council of Science and Technology (CONICET) and Assistant Professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina. Ph.D. in Social Sciences (UBA, 2008) and Degree in Political Sciences (UBA, 2002). Academic interests: Sexuality and Human Rights; Religion, Politics and Gender; and Epistemology of Social Sciences.
Lois Lorentzen co-directs the Center for Latino/a Studies in the Americas at the University of San Francisco. She authored Etica Ambiental and co-edited On the Corner of Bliss and Nirvana: religion, politics, and identity in new migrant communities and The Women and War Reader. Her research focuses on undocumented migrants.
Kemy Oyarzún is Associate Professor of Gender Studies, Critical Thought and Literature at the Universidad de Chile. She is the co-founder of the feminist journal NOMADIAS with Olga Grau and the co-founder, with professor Sonia Montecito, of the Studies in Gender and Culture program at Universidad de Chile. In 2007 she was the recipient of the XX1 Century Woman prize.
Ann Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University, where she also directs the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Her books include: Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race; Secularisms (co-edited with Janet R. Jakobsen); and the forthcoming Excess & Enchantment: Queer Performance Between the Religious and the Secular.
Pablo Semán is a researcher at CONCEIT (Argentina) and a specialist on religion and popular culture.
Juan Marco Vaggione is a researcher at the Argentinean National Council of Science and Technology (CONCEIT) and Professor at the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, National University of Cordoba, Argentina. His background is in Law (Doctorate, National University of Córdoba) and Sociology (Ph.D., New School for Social Research). Interests: religion, politics and sexuality, sexual and reproductive rights.
Melissa M. Wilcox is Associate Professor and Chair of Religion and Director of Gender Studies at Whitman College. She is the author or co-editor of several books and numerous articles on gender, sexuality, and religion, including Coming Out in Christianity: Religion, Identity, and Community; Queer Women and Religious Individualism; and (with David W. Machacek) Sexuality and the World’s Religions.