W&M Featured Events
[PAST EVENT] Abolition is Sacred Work: Race, Religion, and the Practice of New Worlds [Professor Laura McTighe]
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- Open to the public
Professor Laura McTighe of Florida State University visits W&M for the Race and Religion Speaker Series! This lecture series is sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies and the Program in Africana Studies
Abolition is sacred work. How else could we term the work to ask, in the words of organizer Mariame Kaba, ‘What can we imagine for ourselves and the world’? Indeed, ‘the fight to save your life is’, as M4BL cofounder Patrisse Cullors named it, ‘a spiritual fight’. In this talk, Prof. Laura McTighe invites us into her community-driven research at the intersections of race and religion. Grounded in approaches from Black feminisms, Black religions and public humanities, she takes us on a journey to reimagine the study of religion by extricating our work from the violence in which it has long been embedded. For more than twenty years, she has partnered with grassroots communities outside of church institutions and established archives who are using religion to create worlds that are more survivable than our present. Their abolitionist projects are rooted in transformative religio-racial practices that generations of scholars and organizers have used to cross worlds, open portals and conjure revolution. With them, she offers an account of the sacred, not as distinct from the profane, but as something made in relationships through work to build the world anew. In so doing, this talk opens a creative space for exploring some of our country’s most innovative theories of change and the invitation and challenge they offer to us all.
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