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Conference Schedule 2019

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2019 Conference Schedule

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Thursday, June 13

3:00 – 3:30 – Registration (Boole Basement, outside Boole 3)

Official Opening of the Religion/Water/Climate: Changing Cultures and Landscapes Conference

3:30 – 4:00 – Welcoming Remarks

  • Dr. Lidia Guzy, Head of Study of Religions Department
  • Professor Tim Jensen, President of the International Association for the History of Religions
  • Professor Mark Peterson, President of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture
  • Dr. Jenny Butler (Local Conference Organizer)

4:00 – 5:00 – Keynote by Professor Siv Ellen Kraft, “Protecting Mother Earth. Indigenous Religion(s) on Protest Scenes” (Boole 3)

  • Introduction by Dr. Lidia Guzy, University College Cork

6:00 – 7:00 – Reception at Lord Mayor’s Chambers, Cork City Hall

Cork City Hall is located on Anglesea Street about 2.2 km from UCC.
Map available at www.townmaps.ie/cork.html.

 

Friday, June 14 ^ back to top

9:00 – 10:00 – Coffee and Tea (Floor 2 O’Rahilly Building Social Area, Study of Religions Department)

9:00 – 10:00 – Registration (Floor 2 O’Rahilly Building Social Area, Study of Religions Department)

9:00 – 10:30 – Concurrent Session 1

Panel A (O’Rahilly Building Room 201)

Religious Implications in Water Management

  • Godfrey Hove, “Negotiating Survival: Religion, Water Insecurity and Communal Responses in the Context of Climate Change in Rural Zimbabwe’s Mberengwa District, c.1980 – 2017”
  • Bradley Johnson, “The Personal Virtues of Saving Water: A Cape Town Case Study”
  • Adebayo Akinyemi, “Sacred Urbanism: An Ethnography of a Shrinking Sacred Spring in Lagos City”
  • Harshvardhan Tripathy and Ankur Goswami, “Exploring Religious Environmentalism: A Study of Matri Sadan Organization in Haridwar, India”
  • Emma Tomalin, Presiding

 

Panel B (O’Rahilly Building G27B – Mary Ryan Meeting Room)

Religion and Environmental Resilience in the Anthropocene

  • Joseph Witt, “Religion and Resilience among Vietnamese-American Communities on the U.S. Gulf”
  • Courtney O’Dell-Chaib, “Toxic Inheritance and a Kinship of Remainders”
  • Mark Douglas, “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Religions Traditions in the Anthropocene”
  • Carolyn Peach Brown, “An Exploration of Resilience Theory and Religion in the Context of Climate Change”
  • Michael Northcott, Presiding

 

Panel C (O’Rahilly Building G.27A – CACSSS Seminar Room)

Intersecting Art: Changing Religion, Nature, and Culture

Abstract: The panel consists of three presentations – The Selkie: figuring, an essay, Water Stories: culture, religion and everyday life viewed through a liquid lens, and Animism, Thin Places, and Porous Margins: a heterodox dialogue – and addresses the intersecting of art with, and its role in, changing ‘religion’, ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ as currently understood. The presentations argue for, and seek to demonstrate, the value of heterodox exchanges that enact the increasingly necessary intersection of creative, spiritual, socio-political and environmental concerns. Each in its own way offers an arts-animated exposition that embody a radical mobility of perspective and understanding. Collectively, they aim to demonstrate the value of exceeding academic conceptions of interdisciplinarity, given that this is ultimately still predicated on the monotheistic presuppositions that the Enlightenment inherited from the Religions of the Book and, as such, incompatible with the new pluriverse in which we must now think and act.

Speakers:

  • Iain Biggs and Erin Kavanagh, “The Selkie: Figuring, an Essay”
  • Luci Gorell Barnes, “Water Stories: Culture, Religion and Everyday Life Viewed Through a Liquid Lens”
  • Ciara Healy-Musson and Iain Biggs, “Animism, Thin Places, and Porous Margins: A Heterodox Dialogue”

 

10:30 – 11:00 – Coffee Break (O’Rahilly Building Floor 2 Social Area, Study of Religions Department)

 

11:00 – 12:30 – Concurrent Session 2

Panel A (O’Rahilly Building G27B – Mary Ryan Meeting Room)

Environmental Ethics

  • Jakub Koláček, “Islamic Environmental Ethics in Critical Perspective: Different Backgrounds and Discourses”
  • Tim Dunn, “Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood as a Metaphor for Global Warming”
  • Lisa Sideris, “The Ethics of De-Extinction: Wonder as a Resource and Moral Corrective”
  • David Krantz, “Navigating Spiritual Depths: The Development of an Interfaith Ocean Ethic”
  • Elaine Nogueira-Godsey, Presiding

 

Panel B (O’Rahilly Building Room 201)

Holy Wells Healing Waters Pilgrimage

  • Jeane Peracullo, “The Lady of the Lake: Exploring Religion as Vulnerable Poetics of Space”
  • Wojciech Bedynski, “Holy Trees and Wells in the Cultural Landscape of Marian Sanctuaries in Poland”
  • Celeste Ray, “Remembering and Forgetting Local Ecological Knowledge at Ireland’s Holy Wells”
  • Marlene Erschbamer, “Cultural and religious significance of hot springs in Buddhist influenced societies in the Himalayas”
  • Sarah Pike, Presiding

 

Panel C (O’Rahilly Building G.27A – CACSSS Seminar Room)

Indigenous Peoples and Climate Change

Abstract: Anthropogenic climate change is a threat to the entire planet.  Indigenous peoples, however, are uniquely threatened due to a variety of circumstances: location, socio-economic factors, and loss of cultural and economic resources. At the same time, such peoples have been at the forefront of pioneering mitigation and adaptation strategies. Among the threats to indigenous peoples are sea-level rise, saltwater inundation of  coastal freshwater wetlands, extreme erosion, rising in stream temperatures, extreme and more frequent droughts, damage to sacred sites, and loss of cultural and economic resources. In Louisiana, Alaska, and the island states of the Pacific, indigenous peoples have become the first climate refugees.  Yet, as noted above, tribes have found coping strategies. This panel will examine the impact of climate change on indigenous peoples across the globe, with special focus on North America, and their strategies for both physical and cultural survival.

Speakers:

  • Jace Weaver, “Indigenous Peoples as the First Climate Refugees”
  • Gina Richard, “Native Food Sovereignty 911: Sustainable Food Sources in an Era of Climate Change”
  • Padraig Kirwan, “Climate Change and Indigenous Activism”
  • Laura Weaver, Presiding

 

12:30 – 1:00 – ISSRNC Members Meeting (Boole 4)

 

12:30 – 1:30 – Lunch Break

 

1:30 – 3:00 – Concurrent Session 3

 

Panel A (O’Rahilly Building Room 201)

Unsettling Narratives of Climate Change: The Poetic, Imaginary, and Spirit of Living & Dying Together

Abstract: We explore unsettling narratives that offer poetry, memoir, and spirit as compelling perspectives through which to read living and dying in the time of climate change. Through the lens of religious naturalism, White explores the work of nature poets who conceptualize human agency in terms of biorelationality. This “more-than-human” aesthetic suggests an ethics of possibility. Liatsos employs the metaphor of social ecology to read two types of personal narratives, motherhood and terminal illness memoirs, each marked by radical relationality. Applying insights from these liminal ontologies, she queries catastrophic repercussions in the social ecology of the Anthropocene. Keller argues that if we imagine “the spirit of climate change,” we restore the genius of Indigenous insights on matter’s animated nature, wherein ceremony grounds collective action as the spirit takes hold. Each offers new ways of imagining agency and materiality as relational arts in the time of climate change.

Speakers:

  • Carol White, “Disruptions, Ruptures, Reformulations: The Anthropocene Paradox and A Poetics of Nature”
  • Yianna Liatsos, “Narrative Subjectivity and Liminal Agency: Reading the Social Ecologically”
  • Mary Keller, “The Spirit of Climate Change”

 

Panel B (O’Rahilly Building G27B – Mary Ryan Meeting Room)

Resources: Oil and Water

  • Evan Berry, “The ‘Resource Curse’ and Other Modern Mythologies”
  • Victoria Machado, “Water is Life: Sacred Springs of Florida”
  • Elizabeth Allison, “Peak to Paddy: An Indigenous Integrated Water Management System in the Himalayas, Based on Spiritual Values”
  • Susannah Crockford, “A Flood of Waters on the Earth: Discourses of Climate Change among Coastal Communities in South-East Louisiana”
  • Robin Veldman, Presiding

 

Panel C (O’Rahilly Building G27A – CACSSS Seminar Room)

Pedagogy, Contemplation, and Engagement

  • Lucas Johnston, “Teaching the Landscape: Waterways, Lifeways and Climate Solutions”
  • Sarah Robinson-Bertoni, “Climate Reality, Civic Engagement, and Religious Responses”
  • Mark Silk, “Organizing a Coalition of Religious Leaders and Climate Scientists”
  • Mark Hathaway, “Engaging in Outdoor Meditative Practices to Facilitate a Shift towards Ecological Consciousness”
  • Tim Jensen, Presiding

 

Panel D (O’Rahilly Building Room 203)

Landscapes and Waterscapes

  • Julián García Labrador, “Sacred Landscapes in Ecuadorian Upper Amazon. The hybrid aesthetic ecology of Secoya People”
  • Margarita Dadykina, “Russian Ortodox Monasteries and Water Environment in 14-16th Centuries”
  • Uttam Lal, “Landscape of Yaks and their Socio-religious Terrain in the Sikkim Himalaya”
  • Claudette Soumbane Diatta, “Waterscapes of the Ziguinchor Region in Senegal: Representations and Traditional Management Systems”
  • Sarah Nahar, Presiding

 

3:00 – 3:30 – Coffee Break (O’Rahilly Building Floor 2 Social Area, Study of Religions Department)

 

3:30 – 5:00 – Concurrent Session 4

Panel A (O’Rahilly Building Room 201)

Green Religions and Spiritual Ecologists: Empirical Insights from the Current Field of Sustainability and Religion

Abstract: Taken in its wider assumption, ecology can be traced back to the romantic criticism of industrialisation and the longing for “nature” as a wild, mysterious and “reenchanted” entity. In this sense, ecology contained an explicit reference to religion. The discussion raised by Lynn White’s famous argument incited a growing concern within Christian Churches and other world religious institutions about ecological questions in Northern and Southern regions. In the same manner, contemporary spirituality movements display a variety of articulations with current environmental sciences, as well as with broader religious organizations and theological views. The current socio- anthropological dynamics and entanglement between these actors as well with secular ones has yet received little consideration. This panel invites papers describing and reflecting on developments in the field of religion and sustainability, considering that context matters as well as empirical grounding.

Speakers:

  • Christophe Monnot, Salomé Okoekpen and Irene Becci, “Green Religions and Spiritual Ecologists: Current Developments in the Field of Ecology and Religion”
  • Jens Köhrse and Julia Blanc, “Greening Processes among Religious Organizations : Implementations at the Local Level”
  • Jiska Gojowczyk, “The Greening of the Jesuit ‘Ateneos’ in the Philippines”
  • Carrie B. Dohe, “Religions Saving Nature Together? Urban Interreligious Cooperation on Nature Conservation in Germany”
  • Alexandre Grandjean, “Dark Green Agronomies and the ‘Spiritualization’ of Agroecology: The Case of ‘Holistic’ Wine-crafting in Switzerland”
  • Julia Blanc, Responding
  • Jiska Gojowczyk, Presiding

 

Panel B (O’Rahilly Building G27B – Mary Ryan Meeting Room)

Indigenous Responses and Resistance

  • Suzanne Crawford O’Brien, “Coast Salish Ceremonies of Protest: Indigenous Water Protectors on the Salish Sea”
  • Moira Marquis, “Our Fluid Natures: Afrofuturism, Mami Wata and Water Spirit Myths”
  • Anita Carrasco, “The Social Life of Water in the Andes: The Stories of Turi and Toconce”
  • Charisma K. Lepcha, “Interplay of Indigenous Religion, Dammed Rivers and Homegrown Environmentalism Among Lepchas of Sikkim”
  • Andrea McComb Sanchez, “Praying With Rain”
  • Jace Weaver, Presiding

 

Panel C (O’Rahilly Building G.27A – CACSSS Seminar Room)

Apocalypse: Narrative and Culture

  • Robert Boschman, “In the Ground and On the Waters: The Weird Legacies of Uranium City, Canada”
  • Sarah McFarland Taylor, “No Planet B v. Disposable Planet: Self-Fulfilling Technocratic Apocalyptic Prophecies in the Marketing of Mars Colonization”
  • Benjamin Stewart, “Little Apocalypse: How Green Funeral Practitioners Reconfigure the Iconography of Climate Catastrophe”
  • Victor Morales, “The Controlling Narratives of Climate Change”
  • Donovan Schaefer, Presiding

 

5:30 – 6:30 – Keynote by Professor Marianne Lien, “Interruptions: Colonising Practices and Other-than-human Resistance” (Boole 3)

Introduction by Professor Sarah Pike, California State University, Chico

 

7:00 – 8:30 – Reception (Aula Maxima)

 

8:30 – 10:00 – Screening Journey of the Universe (Aula Maxima) Presiding: Dr. Evan Berry, American University

 

Saturday, June 15 ^ back to top

9:00 – 10:30 – Concurrent Session 5

Panel A (O’Rahilly Building Room 201)

Art, Myth, and Metaphor

  • Frederique Penot, “Tales from the Green Shores: A Proposed Method for the Collection, Classification, Analysis and Sharing of Irish Surflore Narratives: A Folkloristic Approach”
  • Junfu Wong, “Responding to Drought: Shamanist Mythical Provenance of Rain Ritual in China”
  • Ben Bridges, “The Pachamama and Eucalyptus Dialectic: Religious Response to Invasive Species in Southern Peru”
  • Graham St John, “Blank Canvas: The Black Rock Playa and Cultivating Ephemerality at Burning Man”
  • Robert Boschman, Presiding

 

Panel B (O’Rahilly Building G27B – Mary Ryan Meeting Room)

Blood in the Water: Toxic Water, Toxic Bodies

Abstract: The papers in this session deal with intersections of race, religion, environmental history, environmental justice, colonialism, gender based violence, globalization, and biomorality with particular attention to the ways in which these topics have related the toxification of water systems and thus of the bodies of particularly marginalized persons. Nodding to Christopher Carter’s argument that there is blood in the soil of US environmentalism, our papers suggest that globally there is blood in our streams, our municipal pipes, our swamps, lakes, oceans. These papers will pay attention to the particularities of place-based water problems and solutions, eschewing (though attentive to) Western, capitalistic, and white approaches to water in both U.S. and South Asian contexts.

Speakers:

  • Georgina Drew, “Drinking Toxic Waters in ‘God’s Country’: Quality Politics and Urban Development in Kochi, India”
  • Patrick Kelly, “Erosion on the Border: International Relations via Racist Engineering on the Rio Grande”
  • Sarah O’Brien, “Poisoning the Public Through Privatization: The Impact of Globalization on Nepalese Urban Waterways”
  • Dawrell Rich, “From Sacred Rivers to Lead Waters: When Waters Are No Longer A Source of Healing in Flint, Michigan”
  • Laurel Kearns, Presiding and responding

 

Panel C (O’Rahilly Building G27A – CACSSS Seminar Room)

Roundtable – Environmental Activism in a Time of Despair: A Counterpoint Conversation

Abstract: In the midst of what is called the 6th extinction, and with pessimistic expectations when it comes to overpopulation and future life on the planet, being an environmentalist is different than 30 years ago. The problems of globalization and the “return” to nationalisms and parochialisms only exacerbate these problems. How do people engaged in environmental action cope with such a situation? This event provides a platform for discussing this topic with representatives from various groups that are engaged in environmental activities and/or who take seriously the multiple critiques of critical theories. While people may share common goals, there can still be clashing values when it comes to expectation, interpretation, and action. In a roundtable conversation, followed by an open discussion with the audience, we want to hear from activists, artists, and scholars about how they respond to the accelerating loss of species and the ecological disaster that we’re in.

Speakers:

  • Whitney Bauman
  • Kocku von Stuckrad
  • Marion Grau
  • Susannah Crockford
  • Lorna Gold
  • Jacob Erickson

 

10:30 – 11:00 – Coffee Break (O’Rahilly Building Floor 2 Social Area, Study of Religions Department

 

10:30 – 11:00 – JSRNC Meet and Greet (O’Rahilly Building Room 201)

 

11:00 – 12:30 – Concurrent Session 6

 

Panel A (O’Rahilly Building Room 201)

Water, Conflict, and the Religious Roots of Resolution: Four Cases in the United States

Abstract: Conflicts over water, whether over individual access or broader debates about best use, are affecting communities all over the world. This panel takes four examples from the United States to examine how water conflict is playing out there and what role religious resources may have in the future of such conflicts. We will look at the origins of the term “environmental racism” in Black theology, a tribal nation in northwest California fighting to restore its sovereignty over the Klamath River, a fishing town on the Gulf of Mexico redefining its self-understanding through water conflict, and at the politics of environmental restoration in the fight over Hetch Hetchy Valley. Bringing these cases together will illuminate the role of religion in resolving environmental conflict in the United States.

Speakers:

  • Dana Lloyd, “‘She is Our Bloodline’: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Klamath River”
  • Alda Balthrop-Lewis, “Ecological Grief During Fishery Collapse: A Case from the Gulf Coast”
  • Vincent Lloyd, “‘Prevent the Flood’: Prison, Race, and Nature in Benjamin Chavis’s Water Psalms”
  • Russel Powell, Presiding

 

Panel B (O’Rahilly Building G27A – CACSSS Seminar Room)

Ecology and Gender Working Group: Gender, Nature, Religion: Changing Cultures and Water/Landscapes

Abstract: Women’s and men’s experiences of climate change are likely to differ from each other due to the fact that all aspects of their lives are gendered. This panel brings together four papers that each address different elements of the relationship between gender, nature, and religion. The first two papers focus on ‘waterscapes’ and the second two papers on ‘landscapes.’ The panel addresses the following broad questions: In what ways does gender impact how women approach climate justice and food security differently than men in terms of styles of activism and spiritual practice? How are women transforming their religious traditions in response to climate change and shifting livelihoods and what are the implications of this? How has human interaction with water and the land been gendered and what are the implications of this for women’s livelihoods, well being, and spirituality?

Speakers:

  • Amanda Nichols, “Hope Spots for Our Blue Heart: An In-depth Study of the Lifework of Sylvia Earle and the Gendered Dynamics of Climate Weirding”
  • Tom Berendt, “Blue Blooded Women: A Gendered Analysis of Water-based Veneration”
  • Emma Tomalin, “Sustainable Development for Pastoralist Women in India: Heritage, Dignity and Adaptations in Times of Rapid Change”
  • Elaine Nogueira-Godsey and Kelsey Ryan-Simkins, “Tangible Actions Toward Solidarity: An Ecofeminist Analysis of Women’s Participation in Food Justice”
  • Sarah Robinson-Bertoni, Presiding

 

Panel C (O’Rahilly Building G27B – Mary Ryan Meeting Room)

What does nature love have to do with care for the planet?

Abstract: The peoples around the Baltic Sea are known to be nature lovers. In fact, for many, this nature love goes as far as to amount to a form of spirituality, which in recent decades has been on the rise while traditional religion has been in sharp decline. But how does this deep adoration for nature translate into action in its defense? For the last two years, we have conducted ethnographic research in the forests of Sweden and Estonia, and on the beaches of Denmark, gathering data on people’s personal relationships with nature. Now, we are entering the next phase, where we look at how personal attitudes and experiences affect social and political thinking and behavior. We suggest a session in the form of a panel discussion where each presenter is given maximum 15 minutes for their individual paper, which leaves room for a lively discussion.

Speakers:

  • Cecilie Rubow, “Ethical Fault Lines Between Nature Romanticism and Climate Activism”
  • David Thurfjell, “Imaginary Forests – And Real: On the Relation Between Nature Romanticism and Environmental Engagement”
  • Henrik Ohlsson, “Selfhood, Awareness, and Action: Forest Therapy on the Junction Between Therapy Culture and Deep Ecology”
  • Respondent: David Thurfjell

 

12:30 – 1:30 – Lunch Break

 

12:30 – 1:30 – JSRNC Editorial Board Meeting [Closed Meeting]

(O’Rahilly Building G27B – Mary Ryan Meeting Room)

 

1:30 – 3:00 – Concurrent Session 7

Panel A (O’Rahilly Building Room 201)

Religion and Extinction (Lightning Talks)

Abstract: Biologists have called the current “sixth mass extinction” an event of “biological annihilation” and a “frightening assault on the foundations of human civilisation” (PNAS 2017). What are religious traditions, practices and doctrines making of it? Theologians and religious studies scholars have considered the specifically religious perspective on the ethics of species loss within the fields of eco-theology and religion and environmental ethics, but rarely have they considered the specific implications of the phenomenon of mass extinction to religious and theological perspectives. For instance, how does it challenge, implicate, and influence beliefs about the future of humanity, death and the afterlife, the integrity of creation, or the relationship between human and nonhuman life? This panel marks the first public presentation of findings of a new international network Religion and Extinction (funded by AHRC 2018-20).

This panel will present findings the network’s research and by pitching short, crystallised arguments or problems from our chapters, seeking critical questions from the ISSRNC community. Discussion on these snapshots will feed into our second session (Concurrent Session 8, Panel A).

Speakers:

  • James Hatley, “Salmon Midrash: Creation and Decreation in the midst of Extinction”
  • Richard Irvine, “Deep Time and the Horror of the Ruin”
  • Willis Jenkins, “Loving Swarms: Religious Ethics Amidst Mass Extinction”
  • Jeremy Kidwell, “Extinction & Religion: Disappearance, Reappearance, and Novel Productions”
  • Timothy B. Leduc, “Re-Planting a Tree of Peace: Ancestral Responses to Uprooted Relations”
  • Kate Rigby, “Oceanic Extinctions and the Dread of the Deep”
  • Lisa Sideris, “De-Extinction and the Ethics of Inevitability”
  • Stefan Skrimshire, “Leaving Home: Extinction and Migration as figures of Exile and Exodus”

 

Panel B (O’Rahilly Building G27A – CACSSS Seminar Room)

Contemporary Pagan Cosmologies

  • Jenny Butler, “‘To the Waters and the Wild’: The Significance of Water in Contemporary Irish Pagan Cosmology and Practice”
  • Barbara Jane Davy, “Weird Ecology: Offerings from the Well of Wyrd”
  • Erika De Vivo, “‘…But Nature remains’: Narratives of resilience at the Sami shamanic festival Isogaisa”
  • Jean Chamel, “From Rights of Rivers to Water Harmony: Rights of Nature Movement, Rituality and Ecospirituality”
  • Sarah Pike, Presiding

 

Panel C (O’Rahilly Building Room 203)

Social Texts of Climate Skepticism

  • Frances Flannery, “A Covenantal Understanding of Human Impact on the Weather and Animals”
  • Robin Veldman, “James Watt, Embattled Evangelical? How the New Right-Christian Right Alliance Shaped American Evangelical Christians’ Environmental Views”
  • Donovan Schaefer, “From Creationism to Climate Change Denial: An Affective Approach to Science Skepticism”
  • S. Jonathon O’Donnell, “Oceanic Calamity and Chastisement in Contemporary American Demonology”
  • Michael Northcott, Presiding

 

Panel D (O’Rahilly Building Room G27B – Mary Ryan Meeting Room)

Reconceptualizing Water as Ground

  • Mark Peterson, “It’s All Wet: Thales Watering the Roots of a New Environmentalism.”
  • Laurel Kearns, “Is There a Growing ‘Blue Wave’ of Religious Environmental Activism in the US?”
  • Caelyn Adams, “It’s not Just Water: A Discussion on Water-Focused Contemplative Ecology”
  • Jaana Kouri, “Environmental Heritage and Experience Based Knowledge of Water”
  • Becky Copeland, Presiding

 

3:00 – 3:30 – Coffee Break (O’Rahilly Building Floor 2 Social Area, Study of Religions Department)

 

3:30 – 5:00 – Concurrent Session 8

Panel A (O’Rahilly Building G27B – Mary Ryan Meeting Room)

Questioning Extinction, Questioning Religion (Roundtable)

Abstract: In this roundtable discussion, members of the Religion and Extinction Network will pose a series of provocations to each other that have arisen in the course of our project. In addition to researching original theses on diverse topics, the project has generated novel questions about this new field, that we want to test here: on the very meaning and relevance – in the age of extinctions – of the category “religion” and its western inheritance; on questioning the dominant frameworks for thinking about extinction such as mourning, grief, loss, death life, kinship, the future, and transformation, in the light of the influence of religion. Input from the wider audience will be invited to help us address these provocations and set an agenda for future research on this crucial topic.

Speakers:

  • James Hatley
  • Richard Irvine
  • Willis Jenkins
  • Jeremy Kidwell
  • Timothy B. Leduc
  • Kate Rigby
  • Lisa Sideris
  • Stefan Skrimshire

 

Panel B (O’Rahilly Building Room 203)

Anthropological Understandings of Religion, Environment and Climate Change in the UK

Abstract: This panel seeks to explore anthropological approaches to religion, belief, and the environment in the context of climate change. A sense of place and location is central to the case studies that comprise the panel papers. The participants combine literary research with first-hand participative fieldwork and interviews. The result is three papers that are both original and nuanced, showing how old practices and ideas are being reshaped in the present to respond to the opportunities, dangers and challenges posed by climate change. The panel is sponsored by the Afterlife Research Centre and Paranthropology, and seeks to push the boundaries of ethnographic research on religion both methodologically and ontologically, being open to the transpersonal, and to relationships with ‘other than human’ beings in the research environment.

Speakers:

  • Jack Hunter, “Permaculture, Extraordinary Experience and Regenerative Energy”
  • Tamzin Powell, “An Anthropological Exploration of Sacred Rites, Water and Landscape for the Cunning Folk of the Welsh Borders”
  • Fiona Bowie, “Hafren/Severn: From River Goddess to Ecological Threat”

 

Panel C (O’Rahilly Building Room G27A – CACSSS Seminar Room)

Fueling and Resisting Petroculture: Christianity and Climate Change

Abstract: More than a mere aspect of society, petroculture designates the ways fossil fuels have shaped even the most basic concepts and values on which society is based: freedom, democracy, individualism, etc. As a quickly growing edge of the environmental humanities, leading voices in petroculture studies emphasize that moving beyond a petroleum based society will require more than technological and scientific answers. Critical analysis and reimagining of modern values, aesthetics, and philosophical concepts is also necessary. In spite of insightful analyses of modern Western petroculture, religious concepts and the ways they have influenced, contributed to, and been shaped by petroculture remains inadequately addressed. This panel will explore resonance between and mutual imbrication of Christian and petroculture social imaginaries. In both critical analyses and constructive proposals, panelists will pay particular attention to the intersection of Christian and petrocultures with gender, sexuality, class, ritual, symbols, race, and colonialism.

Speakers:

  • Hilda Koster, “Fractured Lands/Fractured Bodies: Petroculture and Violence against Native Women in the Dakotas (US)”
  • Jan Pranger, “Petrocultures, Land, and Race in Christian Settler Colonialism in the Northern Plains”
  • Terra Schwerin Rowe, “Of Modern Extraction: Fossil Fuels, Gender and Religion”
  • Marion Grau, “Anointed with Oil: Norway between Petromania and Sustainability”
  • Jake Erickson, “On the Perpetual Desire for Oil: Apophatic Excess, Toxic Creativity, and a Spirituality of Prospective Failure”
  • Celia Deane-Drummond, Presiding

 

5:30 – 6:30 – Keynote by Dr. Marion Bowman, “Sacrality, Swimming Pools and Central Heating: The Changing Cultures and Contexts of Bath’s Hot Springs” (Boole 3)

Introduction by Dr. Jenny Butler, University College Cork

 

7:00 – 9:00 – Banquet and Lifetime Achievement Award Presentation (Devere Hall, Áras na Mac Léinn/Student Centre)

 

9:15 – 10:00 – Screening Testify: Evangelical Christians Facing Climate Change (Kane Building G19)

Anthropologist Dr. Barry Lyons will present clips from his documentary film project exploring how evangelical Christians from the global north and south view climate change. The presentation will be followed by a short Q&A session.

 

Sunday, June 16 ^ back to top 

9:00 – 10:30 – Concurrent Session 9

Panel A (O’Rahilly Building Room G27A – CACSSS Seminar Room)

Rethinking the Environmental Crisis: Textual and Historical Approaches

  • Matthew Hartman, “The Historical Relations of Our Ecological Crisis: Theology, Colonialism, and Capitalism’s Logics”
  • Lady Penaloza-Farfan, “A Model of Spirituality in the Development that Integrates Ancestral South American Wisdom (Suma Kausay) with the New Spirituality of Pope Francis’ Letter (Laudato Si): The Case of an Indigenous Community in Colombia”
  • Becky Copeland, “Rematerializing Visions: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Changing Environments”
  • Jurij Dobravec, “To Mitigate or to Adapt? Greening as Reflects in Fairy-tales and Legends. Example of St. Christopher’s Walking-stick”
  • Whitney Bauman, Presiding

 

Panel B (O’Rahilly Building Room G27B – Mary Ryan Meeting Room)

Rivers

  • Luke Devlin, “Praying Like a River: Psychofluviology and Hagiotoponyms in the Clyde Waterscape”
  • Marie Rowley-Brooke, “‘The problem of our origins is the origin of our problems’ (Midson: 2018)”
  • Adebayo Akinyemi, “Interrogating ‘Ara-Omo’ Identity Construction and the Social Agency of Sacred Stream in Lagos Communities”
  • Neelam Kerketta, “Rethinking Sustainability of Holy Rivers of India: Case Studies of Ganges, Godavari and Narmada”
  • Georgina Drew, Presiding

 

Panel C (O’Rahilly Building Room 201)

Negotiating Religious Participation in Environmental Activism

  • Victor Lam, “Interconnectedness, Reconciliation and Justice: Construction and Tailoring the Content of Value-based Messaging of Climate Change by Religious Environmental Organizations in the Trans- Mountain Pipeline Expansion Resistance, in Vancouver, Canada”
  • Randolph Haluza-DeLay, “The Cosmopolitics of Faith-Based Climate Justice Activism at the UNFCCC”
  • Can Dalyan, “The Secular Belief: Plant Conservation as Homage to Mustafa Kemal’s Legacy in Turkey”
  • Dominic Wilkins, “Catholic Environmental Thought in the Diocese of Syracuse, NY”
  • Derk Harmannij, “Environmentally Concerned Christian Working Within Secular Environmental Groups”
  • Rebecca Kneale Gould, Presiding

 

11:00 – 4:30 – Excursion and Lunch

Those attending the excursion should plan to leave University College Cork at 11:00 am to go to Ardmore in County Waterford, about an hour’s drive. We will gather together following the panels in the foyer of the O’Rahilly Building at 10:45 am and walk to the coach. We will have lunch at Ardmore Gallery and Tearooms, followed by a guided tour in Ardmore. We will depart Ardmore at 3:30 pm, arriving in Cork around 4:30 pm. The final drop-off point will be University College Cork.

Excursion

The trip will be to Ardmore, a seaside village in County Waterford. Ardmore is the anglicized name from the Irish language, Aird Mhór, meaning ‘Great Height’. The tour, which will be led by Liam Suipéil, will address the history and local culture of the place, with attention to Christian heritage, as it is one of the oldest Christian settlements in Ireland, as well as folk religious practices. The guide is a native speaker of Irish (Gaelic) and can explain the meanings and significance of place names. You will see St. Declan’s stone, the ruined church, a holy well, and a round tower (said to be one of the last ones built).

St. Declan is said to have founded a monastic settlement in Ardmore circa 416 CE and to have converted the local population of the Déisi (or Decies, ancient clan of Ireland) before the arrival of St. Patrick which is recorded as 432 CE. St. Declan, in his wish for greater seclusion, constructed a little cell in the place where the ruined church now stands, beside the holy well in which legends tell of the saint baptizing the locals. The well and the stone have been the focus of a ‘pattern day’ or local pilgrimage on the saint’s feast day of July 24th or nearest Sunday.

 

Online Panels ^ back to top

Panel A (view online)

Climate Change and Communities – Resistance and Interpretation

  • Kristin Pomykala and rekumani, “Rights of Nature within the Ho-Chunk Nation, the People of the Sacred Voice: Listening Deeply for a Decolonizing Methodology”
  • Frank Boudinot, “Mythmaking of Paleoclimate in the Anthropocene”
  • Dianne Quigley, “Promoting Ethical Treatment of Land-based Cultural and Spiritual Practices and Beliefs in Climate Change Research: Survey Findings from Field Researchers”

Panel B (view online)

Water: Security, Healing, and Governance

  • Monica Hortegas, “Water and Self in Zen Poetry”
  • Maria Nita, “Healing waters ‘come back to earth’: the biosemiotics, relationality, commercilization and re-branding of the sacred”

*This is a working final draft schedule. Corrections to the program (titles, names, etc) should be sent to the ISSRNC Conference Committee here.