Tag: Culture on the Edge


Culture on the Edge: An Origin Story

Last week, Professors Steven Ramey and Vaia Touna sat down to discuss their involvement with the Culture on the Edge research group and blog, along with their two book series. Though the discussion was intended to focus on Prof. Touna’s recent addition to the published series, it naturally led to a conversation on the implications of fabricating origins and identity. […]

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Scholars Around a Campfire: Understanding Strategic Acts of Identification

Culture on the Edge, a group of scholars studying acts of identity formation and centered here at the University of Alabama, has a new book forthcoming in its series, Studies of Identity Formation. This book, Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity: Toward a Dynamic Theory of People and Place, edited by our own Prof. Vaia Touna, is set for publication in January 2019. […]

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Tales from the Secondary Classroom: Discovering Normative Vocabulary

By Kim Davis Kim earned her B.A. in Religious Studies and French from the University of Alabama in 2003. She went on to earn her Masters in French Linguistics and Literature in 2007 and a Masters in Secondary Language Pedagogy in 2010, both from UA. Kim now teaches French and Mythology at Tuscaloosa County High School. A while back, I wrote about how an early morning Culture on the Edge Facebook post and subsequent conversation with one of its members helped me […]

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Identifying Funny

Those interested in studying identity as a historical, and thus changeable, creation, should watch the recent documentary “When Jews Were Funny,” paying particular attention to the relationship between the off-camera interviewer and filmmaker, Alan Zweig, and his interviewees — especially the older comedians, such as Shelly Berman, pictured above (b. 1925; known more recently to some as Larry David’s father on “Curb Your Enthusiasm”), whose appearances frame the film. […]

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Backstory: Prof. Russell McCutcheon

“Backstory” is a series that asks the REL Faculty to tell us a little bit about themselves, to explore how they became interested in the academic study of religion and their own specialty, elaborating on their current work both within and outside the University. Where are you from? I was born in Port Colborne, Ontario, in Canada, not far from Buffalo, NY, actually, in a region that is called southern Ontario. It’s both an industrial and a farming region—lots of […]

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For Example…

What’s the relevance of the study of religion? Well, religious studies students know how to study things like myths and origins tales, right? And all of us tell origins tales, no? From Uncle so-and-so spinning an annual yarn at some family holiday to scholars trying to find the origins of civilization, we’re all doing it. So that suggests that we’re particularly well-equipped to say a fair bit about how these tales work and why we all tell them. For example, […]

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Biblical Literates

The following post by Russell McCutcheon, reflecting on the role of scholars in Religious Studies, is reposted from the Culture on the Edge blog. That was the headline of a Huffington Post article yesterday, referring to an op-ed piece in the Des Moines Register, co-authored by three Iowa scholars of religion, all with specialties in biblical studies. The newspaper article they wrote opened by stating: […]

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