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An extended set of conversations conducted by three religious studies faculty teaching at large public universities in the Southern United States spurred these reflections on how their institutional locations inflected issues such as the cultural expectations students bring to the classroom, how these expectations interact with the evolving priorities of religious studies departments, and how these factors affect the balance among the various subfields of religious studies and theology that make up such departments.What cultural expectations do students from particular places bring to religious studies classrooms in public universities? How do these expectations interact with the evolving priorities of religious studies departments? How should these factors affect the balance among the various subfields of religious studies and theology that make up such departments? Surely these are questions that many kinds of teachers can benefit from pondering, and we do not claim to address them in any comprehensive or authoritative way in this article. Nor do we recommend approaching the practical challenges these questions pose with any one-size-fits-all formula. Nevertheless we believe we can contribute useful insights to discussions of these interlocking issues. Through a series of structured conversations we came to pose the above questions in sharp relief and deepen our reflections about them -starting from our shared teaching experiences in public universities in the Southern United States. The purpose of this article is to share some of the insights we gained.In the summer of 2005, the Wabash Center for Teaching Theology and Religion convened its first Colloquy for Mid-Career Faculty Teaching Religion at Colleges and Universities. Among the twenty participants and staff, the three of us (Sandie Gravett of Appalachian State University, Mark Hulsether of the University of Tennessee, and Carolyn Medine of the University of Georgia), found ourselves telling similar stories in discussions on teaching despite our significant differences in training and scholarly specializations. The common link appeared obvious. We all worked in large public universities in the Southeast. During the course of many meetings over a three year period -both in the original colloquy and a follow-up project in which the three of us worked with colleagues from our home institutions -we discovered that our teaching landscape shaped our experience as instructors in ways that were distinctive, IN THE CLASSROOM Conversation

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Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. Epistemology is about knowing the difference. Donna Haraway1 At one extreme [scholars of culture] have seen a resistance to theory, an anti-intellectual dismissal of new methods and approaches.... At the other extreme, they have seen a reificationof theory into a 'magic bullet' that can itself position scholars outside the oppressions and exploitations of history. The tragedy of this debate—as is often the case in such moments of antagonism—is that each side misses what the other has to offer. George Lipsitz2 This essay interprets major methodological trends in the history of the movement known as "American Studies," and argues for a particular current approach—a focus on the ways cultural traditions are contested within a framework of struggles for hegemony—which is informed by that history and represents one major trend in the present context. Theories of cultural hegemony highlight how ideas, attitudes, and cultural practices legitimating unequal power relationships come to be accepted as common sense, and how the nature of such common sense is continually renegotiated in specified pragmatic situations involving conflict over cultural and sociopolitical resources. I argue that the most useful approaches to hegemony stress the limits of dominant culture (without ignoring its disproportionate power) and highlight how a variety of culturally plural subcultures engage in such renegotiation as part of complex, often informal, processes of building hegemonic and counterhegemonic coalitions.

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