Positionality and Disclosure in the Religious Studies Classroom

Abstract

Debate about whether the academy functions to indoctrinate students in a liberal agenda frequently presumes a conception of political identity as binary, discrete, or mappable along a single spectrum, and as doxastic, in that it is reducible to one’s professed beliefs. Such an assumption, however, ignores the ways in which power dynamics and hierarchies that exist outside the classroom also operate within it. We propose here that the critical examination of positionality within the classroom, and of how classroom activities can contest, reinforce, and reconfigure such power dynamics, offers an alternative way of conceiving the political. We argue that the methods and literature from the academic study of religion offers a particular contribution to make in such a project.

The View From Late Antiquity

“…This is something that scholars who teach late ancient religion are confronted with regularly in the classroom and daily in public discourse: each of these ideologies depends upon misunderstandings of or ignorance of late antiquity. For example, the Christian supremacist who wants to argue that certain forms of Christianity "won out" because they were in some way "better" than alternative traditions will be, upon studying late antiquity, surprised to find the lines between traditions to be fuzzy, ambiguous, and sometimes simply nonexistent (more extensively discussed in Gibbons and Fruchtman [2020]). And those who would seek to ground triumphalist views of whiteness or western civilization in the classical period (like many of those noted by Zuckerberg [2018]) are stymied by the interpellation of late antique readers and curators into their historical fictions.…”

“…The articles in this issue developed via a fully collaborative process which has worked well to improve all of our individual thinking and (we hope) the final product (Upson-Saia and Doerfler [2020], Ronis and Proctor [2020], Gibbons and Fruchtman [2020], and Fruchtman and Park [2020]). The seven of us met via Skype (with myself, in the capacity of guest editor, acting as facilitator, rather than a leader or collector of materials), and together discussed what aspects of the problem needed the sustained attention of full-length research articles.…”

“…For helpful introductions to late antiquity, seeJohnson (2012),Bowersock, Brown, and Grabar (2001),Rousseau (2012), andBoin (2018). See also the classicBrown (1971Brown ( , 1996,Cameron (1993aCameron ( , 1993b,and Fowden (1993).2 For a problematization of this, along with this model of historical winners and losers, seeGibbons and Fruchtman (2020).…”

Accepting the Inevitability of Politics in the Classroom

“…While building rapport and establishing interpersonally-based pedagogies may be a best practice in an ideal setting, it is important to acknowledge that these might be unattainable by some instructors or even undesirable for them, for the same reasons that we must attend to the positionality of our students: in other words, instructor positionality matters, too (see Gibbons and Fruchtman [2020]). There are myriad reasons an instructor might not feel like they themselves belong at an institution: contingent status, social marginalization or vulnerability, affiliation (or even perceived affiliation) with an underrepresented group, and so forth might all make establishing rapport difficult and even potentially dangerous for some instructors.…”

“…The Derveni Papyrus failed to fully immolate in a funeral pyre and gifted us our oldest extant papyrus scroll(Most 1997, 117). The sole known copy of Beowulf, which had been catalogued incorrectly and forgotten by all before being first happily defenestrated during a fire in 1731, was then accidentally rediscovered by an Icelandic historian fifty years later (seeFulk, Bjork, and Niles 2008, xxv-xxvii).16 See, for instance, the "hidden transcripts" through which non-dominant parties communicate and create community(Scott 1990).17 See also Ahmed (2012), Gutierrez y Muhs et al (2012), andGibbons and Fruchtman (2020) in this issue. For the issue of "the politics of citation" in religious studies, seeParrish (2009).18 Thanks to Sara Ronis for these Twitter suggestions.19 These include, but are not limited to, historical accidents (like the manuscript survivals described in note 15 above), cultural devaluations of non-elite epistemologies (for example, defining literacy as being able to read and write in a non-vernacular language), and concerted programs of erasure (including the marginalization of "heterodox" views after Church councils).…”