[Commlist] CFP conference on media and religious nationalism

*Announcing a CMRC Conference *

**

**

*Fire on the Mountain *

*Media, Religion, and Nationalism *

**

**

*The Center for Media, Religion, and Culture *

*University of Colorado Boulder *

**

*January 10-13, 2024 *

The title of this conference is not a mere play on words or a dramatic 
ploy to get your attention. Nor is a reference to the threat of fire 
looming far and near just a convenient metaphor to think with. There is 
indeed fire on the mountain and its billowing smoke is visible 
everywhere. Nationalism pervades our lived imaginaries. It is a fire 
kindled by the ambers of hardened racial identities, cultural 
fundamentalisms, religious extremism, and deep political polarization. 
Consider the nostalgic chorus of Trump’s/Make America Great Again/and 
its racial and religious overtones, the spectacular display of white 
Christian nationalism during the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. 
Capitol, the far-right messianism of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia 
Meloni and its slogan to defend God, Country, and Family, the triumph of 
Christian nationalist parties in Poland and Hungary and their xenophobic 
campaigns against refugees, the increasing persecution of religious 
minorities by Hindu nationalists in India, the intimate marriage between 
Brazil’s Bolsonaro’s populism and evangelical Christians, the Ottoman 
nostalgia and Islamic nationalism of Turkey’s Erdogan, the religious 
politics of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the crackdown on Muslims by 
Buddhist nationalist monks in Myanmar, the persistent Jewish nationalism 
of Israel in occupied Palestine, and the alliance of Russia’s Orthodox 
Church with Putin’s dark plans in the ongoing assault against Ukraine.

Nationalism has a deep history rooted in empire, territory, capitalism, 
globalization, race, ethnicity, language, culture, and religion, but its 
disturbing resurgence today prompts us to ask old and new questions 
about its sources, the reasons behind its appeal, its rhetorical 
devices, its mythological foundations, its storytellers, its mediations, 
its affects, and its futures. There may be nothing inherently or 
inevitably religious about nationalism, but a growing convergence of 
religion, national pride, and exclusionary identity politics, while not 
new, is generating arguably distinct media cultures centered on 
fermenting nationalist passions and buoyed by the sophisticated 
aesthetics and communicative power of a different media apparatus. We 
wonder, as Mark Juergensmeyer asks, “why have limited loyalties and 
parochial new forms of ethno-religious nationalism surfaced in todays’ 
sea of post-nationality?”, that is in a so-called ‘global world’ marked 
by mass migrations, travel, transnational networks, and ease of 
communication.

Religious nationalism today emerges in the context of a new media 
ecology, and we will ask how we can trace the saliency, follow the 
reproduction, and perhaps reveal the invisibility of this enduring 
ideology and its narratives given the nature and affordances of our 
pervasive and complex media environment. Put simply, this conference 
probes the intimate nexus between media, religion, and nationalism. In 
doing so, it also hopes to locate other pathways for the expression of 
national consciousness that is unburdened by the dualism of us and them 
and the toxic delirium of fetishized identity. In/Wretched of the 
Earth/, the Martinican philosopher and activist Frantz Fanon warned 
against a nationalism too constrained by the colonial logic of the 
Enlightenment and rooted in a racialized script of exclusion and border 
thinking that is endemic to nation building. Instead, he understood 
national consciousness as an emergent and expiring liberatory project 
that is fully committed to both the local and the transnational and a 
persistent effort to find a collective future grounded in the relational 
fecundity of difference, not the weaponized nostalgia of sameness. That 
call against replacing one imperial supremacy with another form of 
anxious supremacy should be a resonant plea at the heart of our global 
crisis today.

This will be the tenth in a series of successful international 
conferences held by the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture in 
Boulder. The previous meetings have brought together an 
interdisciplinary community of scholars for focused conversations on 
emerging issues in media and religion. Each has proven to be an 
important landmark in the development of theory and method in its 
respective area and has resulted in important collaborations, 
publications, and resources for further research and dialogue.

The conference will feature keynote lectures and roundtable 
conversations, as well as thematic panels and artistic performances. We 
invite papers and panels from across disciplines, intellectual 
traditions, and geographic locations that engage with these questions 
and beyond. Possible topics could include but are not limited to the 
following:

  * Coloniality, imperialism, and religious nationalism
  * Nationalism, race, ethnicity, gender, and religious identity
  * Religious nationalism, media, and political theology
  * The global rise of right-wing populism, religion, and media
  * Counter-discourses of sovereignty and self-determination
  * Decolonial critiques in the study of religion, media, and nationalism
  * Nation, nationalism, and globalization
  * Secular nationalism “versus” religious nationalism
  * Religion, nationalism, and social media
  * Religious nationalism, journalism, conspiracy theories, and
    disinformation
  * Religion, nationalism, and transnational networks

Abstracts of individual papers and panels of 300-350 words should be 
submitted (tocmrc /at/ colorado.edu) <mailto:(cmrc /at/ colorado.edu)>by July 30, 
2023. Please include your email address and university affiliation in 
your submission.

For questions, email Nabil Echchaibi, 
Director:(nabil.echchaibi /at/ colorado.edu) <mailto:(nabil.echchaibi /at/ colorado.edu)>

Or Deborah Whitehead, Associate Director:(deborah.whitehead /at/ colorado.edu) 
<mailto:(deborah.whitehead /at/ colorado.edu)>

*
*

*Conference as Glitch*

Since the beginning of the pandemic, our Center has been focusedthrough 
its weekly seminar on reading about crisis and urgency, repair and 
abolition, hope and resilience. We heard from scholars who asked,“why we 
write and for whom” 
<https://hypermediations.net/writing-in-times-of-urgency/>and listened 
to artists and activists plead to slow things down, to renew with the 
bliss of coalition, and to challenge our habits of assembly. In the 
spirit of the call not only to notice the/fire on the mountain/and with 
the sensibility of generous fellowship, we would like to extend a 
similar invitation to the participants of this conference.

Do we just pretend like nothing happened and continue business as usual 
now that the ugliness has been covered again? Do we simply return to the 
safety and privilege of our isolated towers and pass up a unique 
opportunity to turn our gathering into a real occasion for 
transformative possibility? Do we resign to the intellectual 
gratification of our academic conversations and remain haunted by the 
inaudibility of our ideas beyond the walls of our extravagant hotels and 
convention centers?

We invite you to think with us, to rehearse together, how we can remedy 
the study space and scope of the Conference beyond the neoliberal 
jingles of speed, relevance, visibility, and publicity, how we can 
refuse the institutional tameness of our gatherings to air out the real 
gasps behind our intellectual commitments, and how we can defy the lure 
of the temporary fix in favor of remaking the world anew. What is the 
point of conferencing in the wake of catastrophe? We must dare to ask: 
what do we want from this conference? What do we want from us? The world 
screams for radical departures, for gatherings that match the chaos of 
the times.

This is not a nostalgic plea to return to some glorious past of the 
academic conference. This is a gentle chorus to find that elusive 
symphony of being ‘really’ and ‘deeply’ together for the sake of 
something that far exceeds our intellectual ecstasy and is radical 
enough to justify the environmental folly of our costly travels. “There 
is fire on the mountain” is not a pretty slogan. It is an invitation to 
go off script together.

*Confirmed Speakers:*

**

*Philip Gorski:* 
<https://sociology.yale.edu/people/philip-gorski>**Professor of 
Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale University. He writes on 
religion and politics in early modern and modern Western Europe and 
North America from a comparative historical perspective. His current 
work focuses on the history and politics of White Christian Nationalism 
and American Civil Religion. He is the co-author of/The Flag and the 
Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American 
Democracy./ 
<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-flag-and-the-cross-9780197618684?cc=us&lang=en&;>

*Raka Shome: 
<https://www1.villanova.edu/university/liberal-arts-sciences/scholarship/endowed/harron.html>*The 
Harron Family Endowed Chair, and Professor of Communication at Villanova 
University. She writes on postcolonial cultures, transnational feminism 
and nationalism as they intersect with media/communication cultures. Her 
current research interests are in Asian (and non-western) Modernities, 
Contemporary Indian (Hindu) Nationalism and Gender; the Global South; 
Transnational Politics of Knowledge Production as a Communication 
issue. She is the author of/Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National 
Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture./ 
<https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p080302>////

*Ramesh Srinivasan* 
<https://seis.ucla.edu/faculty-and-research/faculty-directory/ramesh-srinivasan>*:*Professor 
of information studies and design media arts at UCLA and Director of UC 
Digital Cultures Lab. He writes about the intersection of technology, 
innovation, politics, business, and society. A Bernie Sanders campaign 
surrogate and author of /Beyond the Valley: How Innovators around the 
World are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of 
Tomorrow/ <https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/beyond-valley>, Srinivasan 
militates for a democratic Internet and a digital bill of rights around 
the world.

*Reiland Rabaka: 
<https://www.colorado.edu/ethnicstudies/people/core-faculty/reiland-rabaka>*Professor 
of African, African American, and Caribbean Studies in the Department of 
Ethnic Studies and Founding Director of the Center for African and 
African American Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His 
books include/W.E.B. Du Bois and the Disciplinary Decadence of Sociology 
<https://books.google.com/books/about/Against_Epistemic_Apartheid.html?id=bqcNngEACAAJ>/;/The 
Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism 
<https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Pan-Africanism/Rabaka/p/book/9780367488895>/;//and/Black 
Power Music! Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement. 
<https://www.routledge.com/Black-Power-Music-Protest-Songs-Message-Music-and-the-Black-Power-Movement/Rabaka/p/book/9781032184319>///

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