The United States has experienced a summer of outrage and soul searching about systemic racism. As the fall semester approaches, faculty will need to respond to the national reckoning with racism and craft responsive and accountable teaching and learning. Following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rem'mie Fells, Riah Milton, Tony McDade, Rayshard Brooks, Oluwatoyin Salau, Black transgender women, and many others, faculty and students alike will look for ideas about how to make their online and in-person classrooms spaces for education about systemic racism and training for means to combat it.
In this webinar presented by the AAR Committee on Teaching and Learning, four of the country’s leading anti-racist educators will discuss concrete teaching strategies that faculty may implement to develop anti-racist classrooms across courses in religious studies and theology.
Stephanie Y. Mitchem is a professor of religious studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. She uses anthropology, history, cultural studies, and women’s studies in order to examine religion and religious ethics.
Stephen G. Ray Jr. is the president of Chicago Theological Seminary and the president of the Society for the Study of Black Religion. Having written and lectured broadly in the areas of systematic theology, African American religion, human rights, and the intersection of religion and politics, President Ray’s current work focuses on reinvigorating the public square as a place for all and reclaiming a vital expression of progressive religion in that project.
Shreena N. Gandhi is a part of the Religious Studies Department at Michigan State University, where she primarily teaches classes on religion and race in the Americas. She is currently finishing a manuscript, A Cultural History of Yoga in the United States, which looks at the impact of race, gender, and class on how yoga is practiced and commodified in religious and secular spaces. She is also working on two other projects: one on religious seeking in the colonial and post-colonial global south, and another on how to transform US religious history into an anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-sexist discipline which helps move forward the goals of decolonization.
Karen Teel is professor of theology at the University of San Diego, where she has taught since 2007. She earned her PhD in systematic theology at Boston College, mentored by M. Shawn Copeland. Her courses invite students to grapple with their social locations as well as with European Christianity's role in creating and perpetuating racism and white supremacy. Her current research aims to expose whiteness as a problem in theology. She has published articles in venues including Teaching Theology and Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and Theological Studies (forthcoming), and she is the author of Racism and the Image of God.