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WHAT ARE THEY?
The Center’s research life has been built upon a synergistic, two-part program: Working Groups and the Bridging Seminar. Faculty-run working groups have been the heart of the Center’s intellectual life. Key NYU and outside faculty from a number of disciplines organized working groups on topics linked to their own and colleagues' particular research interests around the topic of religion and media. They represent not only some of our most distinguished faculty but also the kind of "global reach" in terms of religious traditions, cultural locations, and intellectual approaches that the Center fosters. The Center’s Fellows and invited graduate students also participated in the Working Groups relevant to their projects.
The Bridging Seminar brought together the members of the current Working Groups and their guests, providing a regular intellectual space for “cross-talk” between specialties. Outside speakers continue to present current work around the annual theme that unites a number of interests, giving members of the group an opportunity to encounter new scholarly work.
Our Bridging Seminars follow the annual theme which, for 2008–2009, is Culture, Religion and the Politics of Change.
EXAMPLES OF PAST AND CURRENT WORKING GROUPS:
Secularism, Religious
Authority, and the Mediation of Knowledge
Conveners: Angela Zito, Religious Studies/Anthropology;
Fred Myers, Anthropology
A range of challenges to “secularism” emerging in
contemporary forms of religious community and identity position
themselves within and against secular regimes associated with
modernity, particularly postcolonial secular states. These include
battles over the authority of “scientific” knowledge,
legal debates over the role of the state in relation to the religious,
and the destabilization of longstanding consensus (at least in
the US) about the neutrality of secular-based educational institutions.
We explore various media through which these challenges are
mounted, pursued, and performed, and through which they acquire
social weight.
Gods Elect?: Elections, Region, and the Media
Convener: Convener: Diana Taylor, Performance Studies
This working group brings together top scholars, artists, and journalists in
the NY region to meet, present work, and jointly consider how religion and the
media currently inform political races and elections in the Americas. How do
politicians running for office perform their belief? How does the media present
a country or community as defined by certain religious tenets? We will explore
how political strategists use focus groups and devise campaigns to mobilize
specific communities around religious and other issues. How do these strategies
play out in very different national arenas?
Jews, Media, and Religion
Conveners: Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Performance Studies & Hebrew
/Judaic Studies and Jeffrey Shandler, Jewish Studies, Rutgers University
This group combines a contemporary perspective on the uses
of new media with an historical perspective on how a Jewish
diaspora, over two millennia, has used "media" (the
book, rabbinical correspondence, etc.) to constitute, sustain, and mobilize
itself across wide geographic areas. A particular focus is on how digital media
technologies are being used across a wide range of Jewish groups--with special
attention to their mobilization in orthodox communities.
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