Professors around the department often talk about their “research.” But what exactly is that? It’s something to do with books and articles, right? In hopes of showing how some of us work–or at least how I work–below is a day by day running journal of a five day research trip I took to the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. […]
Read More from One Week of Research in an Archive: A Journal
In this day of increasingly corporatized higher ed, where we sometimes interact with students through the medium of learning management systems, and in which scholars’ relationships with publishers is equally mediated through online submission systems, it’s worth mulling over for who benefits from such systems. For whom are they designed and to what effect? […]
Jeff Blanchard is a Senior at the University of Alabama and is set to graduate in May. He is a Blount Scholar majoring in History and minoring in Religious Studies. The following was written for REL 360: Popular Culture/Public Humanities. The National Security Agency (NSA) was founded in 1952 for collecting, processing, and protecting information for the United State government. In 2013 Edward Snowden, an employee of an NSA contractor, flew to Hong Kong and meet with journalists to start the […]
Read More from Exposing the Truth: Citizen Four and the Importance of Authorship
Yes, this semester we’re celebrating our Department’s 50th anniversary. If you’re interested in some of the historical background, then see this post from this past August. The short story is that UA’s Department of Religious Studies dates to 1932, as best we can tell, but only in 1966-7 did the university — just like public universities all across the US — make the changes necessary for students to study religion in a manner that satisfied the requirements of the US […]
Mark Ortiz (far left) graduated from the University of Alabama in May 2015 with degrees in Religious and Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Geography at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he studies the connections between global climate politics and ethics. Survival…, what a dreary thought. As a climate change researcher, the concept of survival calls to mind dystopian images of underground bunkers, moribund ecosystems, and tough political trade-offs. Graduate school, while taxing, is (or should be) considerably […]
Read More from Notes on Surviving and/or Flourishing in Graduate School
Have you seen The Carbonaro Effect? It’s a TV show where an undercover magician does tricks in settings where people don’t expect to see magic performed, and we get to watch their reaction. Maybe he’s working at a cash register in a grocery store and finds a live chick in the dozen eggs you’re buying or maybe he’s someone you meet in the break room at work who pulls an incredible amount of food from his little lunch bag, along […]
Liz Long graduated from the University of Alabama in May 2016 with degrees in Religious Studies and Psychology. She then moved to Indianapolis with Teach for America and taught second grade and preschool for three months total before leaving the program. She now works for the Indiana Department of Child Services. Earlier, I wrote about Teach for America (TFA) and issues in the American education system. In this post, I’ll dive deeper into public charter schools. You may have seen […]
Read More from Charter Schools in America (and Why I Quit Teaching at One of Them)
I saw the above tweet yesterday, which prompted me to mull over why we generally think that the role of religion is such a complicated thing to study. It occurred to me that it is complicated (i) if you fail to recognize that there’s been trained scholars of religion out there for well over 100 years who have lots to say on these matters but also (ii) if we buy local accounts of it being some ethereal thing that mysteriously […]
I was at one of the field’s doctoral schools a while back, to give a talk, and heard from a couple sources — both grad students repeating what they’d been told as well as from a faculty member — that the primary purpose for students to be enrolled in graduate school (or perhaps at that particular one) was “to write a field-changing dissertation.” Sure, being professionalized as a grad student, such as accumulated publications of your own and gaining teaching […]
What better way to mark fifty years of studying religion at the University of Alabama than to institute our first graduate degree — something that’s been in planning for several years now? […]