Constructing "Data" in Religious Studies: Examining the Architecture of the Academy(NAASR Working Papers)

Constructing "Data" in Religious Studies provides a critical introduction to the ways in which the category "data" is understood, produced, and deployed in the discipline of religious studies. The volume is organized into four different sections, entitled "Subjects," "Objects," "Scholars," and "Institutions," with an epilogue by Russell McCutcheon and Aaron Hughes. The volume's aim is to reflect, first, on the problems, strategies, and political structures through which scholars identify (and therefore create) data, and second, on the institutions, extensions, and applications of that data. The first three sections are spearheaded by a key essay and followed by four responses, all of which consider how the politics of the academy determine the very nature of the things we purport to study. The fourth section considers what these concepts look like as they are applied and further institutionalized in college and university structures, and itself includes four essays on "teaching," "departments," "research," and "labor." Finally, the epilogue closes the volume with a consideration on the politics of scholarly collegiality, transforming the data-makers (scholars) into data themselves.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: , “If I Had A Nickel For Every Time…”: Thinking Critically About “Data” Leslie Dorrough Smith Part I: Subjects 1. Partitioning “Religion” and its Prehistories: Reflections on Categories, Narratives, and the Practice of Religious Studies Annette Yoshiko Reed, New York University Responses: 2. A More Subtle Violence: The Footnoting of “the Aboriginal Principle of Witnessing” by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada Adam Stewart, Crandall University 3. Categorization and Its Discontents M Adryael Tong, Fordham University (PhD candidate) 4. Categorizing Contrariety: Narrative and Taxonomy in the Construction of Sikhism John Soboslai, Montclair State University 5. Interrogating Categories with Ethnography: On the `Five Pillars’ of Islam Jennifer A. Selby, Memorial University of Newfoundland Part II: Objects 6. Objects and Objections: Methodological Reflections on the Data for Religious Studies Matthew C. Baldwin, Mars Hill University Responses: 7. The Red Hot Iron: Religion, Nonreligion, and the Material Petra Klug, University of Bremen 8. Surprised By History: A Response to Baldwin Holly White, Independent Scholar 9. Governance and Public Policy as Critical Objects of Investigation in the Study of Religion Peggy Schmeiser, University of Saskatchewan and University of Regina 10. Negative Dialektik and the Question Concerning the Relation Between Objects and Concepts: A Response to Matthew Baldwin Lucas Wright, University of California, Santa Barbara (PhD candidate) Part III: Scholars 11. “[T]he thing itself always steals away”: Scholars and the Constitution of Their Objects of Study Craig Martin, St Thomas Aquinas College Responses: 12. Scholars and the Framing of Objects Vaia Touna, University of Alabama 13. Serial Killers and Scholars of Religion Martha Smith Roberts, Denison University 14. Caffeinated & Half-Baked Realities: Religion as the Opium of the Scholar Jason WM Ellsworth, Dalhousie University (PhD candidate) 15. On the Seminal Adventure of the Trace: A Response to Craig Martin Joel Harrison, Northwestern University (PhD candidate) Part IV: Institutions 16. Labor: Finding the Devil in Indiana Jones: Mythologies of Work and the State of Academic Labor James Dennis LoRusso, Princeton University 17. Teaching: Teaching in the Ideological State of Religious Studies: Notes Towards a Pedagogical Future Richard Newton, University of Alabama 18. Departments: Competencies and Curricula: The Role of Academic Departments in Shaping the Study of Religion Rebekka King, Middle Tennessee State University 19. Research: Religious Studies Research In an Era of Neoliberalization Gregory D. Alles, McDaniel College Epilogue The Gatekeeping Rhetoric of Collegiality in the Study of Religion Aaron W. Hughes, University of Rochester, and Russell McCutcheon, University of Alabama

About the Author :
Leslie Dorrough Smith is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies and Philosophy at Avila University (Kansas City, MO), where she is also the Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program. She is the author of Righteous Rhetoric: Sex, Speech, and the Politics of Concerned Women for America (Oxford, 2014) and is working on a manuscript on the social significance of political sex scandals in the United States. Her research interests focus on American conservative Protestants, critical theory, and the use of method and theory in both religious studies and gender studies.