REL 512.001
Debates in Method and Theory
R | 1:30-3:20
PRH 210
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In this graduate seminar, we will organize our discussions around a concept that has long animated a number of pivotal debates in the humanities: “identity.” Paying particular attention to how this concept continues to be deployed in the academic study of religion, we will attend to important questions regarding the term and how those questions shape different modes of scholarship across the humanities. What are the possibilities and limitations of certain theoretical and methodological approaches to identity? When, how, and why does a scholar’s own identity enter into the kind of work they do? Should it play a role at all? What is “identity” taken to name in the first place? In the process of examining how scholars address these and other questions, we will also explore the form and function of academic debate as a genre of writing and rhetoric.
K. Merinda Simmons
- Office hours:
By appointment
- (205) 348-5271
- merinda.simmons@ua.edu
Readings