K Merinda Simmons
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 1430550 |
|---|---|
| NOME | K Merinda Simmons |
| PRENOMES | K Merinda |
| SOBRENOME | Simmons |
| ASSINATURA | SIMMONS K M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Alabama |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4368-218X |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 19 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 3 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 18 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2013 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 1 |
Thinking Structurally and Inventively about the Changing Same
On “Evidence” and Authenticity Claims in Paranormal TV History
K. Merinda Simmons talks with media studies scholars Matt Boyd Smith and Stefania Marghitu about “Evidence” and Authenticity Claims in Paranormal TV History
Critical Conversations
The dubious anxiety of scholarly relevance
Based on comments made as part of a plenary roundtable at the 2023 annual meeting of the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, this brief essay examines the discourse on the public relevance of religious studies scholarship. Specifically, it identifies the anxieties present in such discussions and the false theory-praxis binary on which they rely
Speaking Theory to Power
Religious studies scholars invested in something called “method and theory” seem intent on remaining stuck in a conversation dictated by proving our political worth in the world. That desire to move outside the walls of the academy ironically keeps us trapped inside one of its smallest and most unfortunate corners, where a theory/praxis binary is manufactured and propagated, kept alive by our personal anxieties about our professional value. My co…
From Essence to Queery—Puzzling Over the Persistence of Identity
The following conversation between K. Merinda Simmons (University of Alabama) and Jeremy Posadas (Austin College) is an outgrowth of a roundtable on class, identity, and religion presented as part of the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR) meeting in November 2020. That discussion reflected participants’ respective approaches and research emphases, of course, but we all in one way or another focused our comments on the ro…
Giving Postblackness the Silent Treatment
Review Article| June 01 2021 Giving Postblackness the Silent Treatment Prefiguring Postblackness: Cultural Memory, Drama, and the African American Freedom Struggle of the 1960s. By Davis, Carol Bunch. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi. 2015. x, 210 pp. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $30.00; e-book available.Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics. By Crawford, Margo Natalie. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2017…
Mode over Matter
The story Aaron Hughes tells in From Seminary to University (2020) is at once archival and timely, not because it presumes to transport the past into the present or mine for prescriptive insights from thinkers long gone but because it “provide[s] a historical work that accounts for ‘how’ as opposed to ‘what’” (13). In presenting a narrative arc for the study of religion in Canada, the book offers a model of how nuanced historiography might attend…
Religious Studies and Race
At the 2019 meeting of the AAR in San Diego, California, Richard Newton, Emily Crews, and Merinda Simmons led a workshop discussing the current state of race studies in academia, particularly in light of NAASR’s attempts to locate itself among other fields undergoing similar work. While highlighting work occurring outside our field, Simmons et. Al addressed the need for discussions in our field to become more proactive rather than reactive, urgin…
Religious Studies for Cyborgs
As it appears, the back and forth between CSR and critical theory pays a great deal of attention to religion as a classificatory and explanatory object but has thus far left alone another category—that of the human. Scholars in other fields, however, have long demonstrated the human subject to be a slippery trope all its own whose rhetorical and analytical value is not at all a given. It is on the evolution and contemporary state of this vein of …
Identifying Race and Religion
The common usage of “race” and “religion” in popular discourse makes overlooking the complicated histories of both terms easy to do. As a corrective to this simple oversight, this chapter examines the scholarly transitions that began to reintroduce race and religion as modern classifications rather than as universal phenomena that transcend specific societal contexts. Both terms underwent massive overhauls as recently as the eighteenth and ninete…
Power Play
This essay examines how the rhetoric of recovery and reclamation functions in scholarly projects that aim to switch traditional or historical narrative codes. After describing the discourse on “post-blackness” as an example of how prefixes serve as problematic stabilizers in academe, I will offer a few moments in recent popular commemorative culture – especially the events that recognized desegregation at the University of Alabama – as narrative …
Canon Fodder
This brief review of The Norton Anthology of World Religions uses the anthology as an occasion to consider the poststructuralist analytical offerings of what came to be known as the canon wars in literary studies, suggesting that the academic field of religious studies would be well-served to engage in its own canon wars. Doing so would begin to deconstruct in productive ways the protectionist and/or descriptive stance too many scholars of religi…
Telling West Indian Lives
The Trouble with Post-Blackness
Religion in the Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin
Keeping "critical" critical
In early March 2014, some of the members of Culture on the Edge-a scholarly research collaboration of seven scholars of religion, interested in more theoretically sophisticated studies of identity, and all of whom are at different career stages and at a variety of North American institutions-had a conversation online on the use of the terms "critique" and "critical," terms widely used in the field today but employed in such a variety of ways that…
Regulating Identities
This essay provides a critical response to Atalia Omer’s JAAR article in which she claims that Russell McCutcheon’s work stacks up a false dichotomy between critics and caretakers. Using a context of peace and conflict studies, Omer suggests that critical caretaking would give conversations in religious studies a “real world” relevance and would allow scholars to recuperate the voices of marginalized groups. In response to her call for recuperati…
Protective Parroting
Atalia Omer’s essay “In the Critic vs. Caretaker Dichotomy A Magic Dwells: Parroting McCutcheon, Policing ‘Religion’ (A Rejoinder to Merinda Simmons)” responds to my MTSR article “Regulating Identities: The Silences of Critical Caretaking.” In this rejoinder to her response, I answer to her main critiques of my article, and I suggest that her distinction between the academy and “the real world” is a problematic one that exempts, and thus protects…
Keeping "critical" critical
In early March 2014, some of the members of Culture on the Edge-a scholarly research collaboration of seven scholars of religion, interested in more theoretically sophisticated studies of identity, and all of whom are at different career stages and at a variety of North American institutions-had a conversation online on the use of the terms "critique" and "critical," terms widely used in the field today but employed in such a variety of ways that…
Protective Parroting
Atalia Omer’s essay “In the Critic vs. Caretaker Dichotomy A Magic Dwells: Parroting McCutcheon, Policing ‘Religion’ (A Rejoinder to Merinda Simmons)” responds to my MTSR article “Regulating Identities: The Silences of Critical Caretaking.” In this rejoinder to her response, I answer to her main critiques of my article, and I suggest that her distinction between the academy and “the real world” is a problematic one that exempts, and thus protects…
Regulating Identities
This essay provides a critical response to Atalia Omer’s JAAR article in which she claims that Russell McCutcheon’s work stacks up a false dichotomy between critics and caretakers. Using a context of peace and conflict studies, Omer suggests that critical caretaking would give conversations in religious studies a “real world” relevance and would allow scholars to recuperate the voices of marginalized groups. In response to her call for recuperati…
Protective Parroting
Atalia Omer’s essay “In the Critic vs. Caretaker Dichotomy A Magic Dwells: Parroting McCutcheon, Policing ‘Religion’ (A Rejoinder to Merinda Simmons)” responds to my MTSR article “Regulating Identities: The Silences of Critical Caretaking.” In this rejoinder to her response, I answer to her main critiques of my article, and I suggest that her distinction between the academy and “the real world” is a problematic one that exempts, and thus protects…
Keeping "critical" critical
In early March 2014, some of the members of Culture on the Edge-a scholarly research collaboration of seven scholars of religion, interested in more theoretically sophisticated studies of identity, and all of whom are at different career stages and at a variety of North American institutions-had a conversation online on the use of the terms "critique" and "critical," terms widely used in the field today but employed in such a variety of ways that…
The Trouble with Post-Blackness
Religion in the Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin
Canon Fodder
This brief review of The Norton Anthology of World Religions uses the anthology as an occasion to consider the poststructuralist analytical offerings of what came to be known as the canon wars in literary studies, suggesting that the academic field of religious studies would be well-served to engage in its own canon wars. Doing so would begin to deconstruct in productive ways the protectionist and/or descriptive stance too many scholars of religi…
Telling West Indian Lives
Identifying Race and Religion
The common usage of “race” and “religion” in popular discourse makes overlooking the complicated histories of both terms easy to do. As a corrective to this simple oversight, this chapter examines the scholarly transitions that began to reintroduce race and religion as modern classifications rather than as universal phenomena that transcend specific societal contexts. Both terms underwent massive overhauls as recently as the eighteenth and ninete…
Power Play
This essay examines how the rhetoric of recovery and reclamation functions in scholarly projects that aim to switch traditional or historical narrative codes. After describing the discourse on “post-blackness” as an example of how prefixes serve as problematic stabilizers in academe, I will offer a few moments in recent popular commemorative culture – especially the events that recognized desegregation at the University of Alabama – as narrative …
Religious Studies and Race
At the 2019 meeting of the AAR in San Diego, California, Richard Newton, Emily Crews, and Merinda Simmons led a workshop discussing the current state of race studies in academia, particularly in light of NAASR’s attempts to locate itself among other fields undergoing similar work. While highlighting work occurring outside our field, Simmons et. Al addressed the need for discussions in our field to become more proactive rather than reactive, urgin…
Religious Studies for Cyborgs
As it appears, the back and forth between CSR and critical theory pays a great deal of attention to religion as a classificatory and explanatory object but has thus far left alone another category—that of the human. Scholars in other fields, however, have long demonstrated the human subject to be a slippery trope all its own whose rhetorical and analytical value is not at all a given. It is on the evolution and contemporary state of this vein of …
From Essence to Queery—Puzzling Over the Persistence of Identity
The following conversation between K. Merinda Simmons (University of Alabama) and Jeremy Posadas (Austin College) is an outgrowth of a roundtable on class, identity, and religion presented as part of the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR) meeting in November 2020. That discussion reflected participants’ respective approaches and research emphases, of course, but we all in one way or another focused our comments on the ro…
Giving Postblackness the Silent Treatment
Review Article| June 01 2021 Giving Postblackness the Silent Treatment Prefiguring Postblackness: Cultural Memory, Drama, and the African American Freedom Struggle of the 1960s. By Davis, Carol Bunch. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi. 2015. x, 210 pp. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $30.00; e-book available.Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics. By Crawford, Margo Natalie. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2017…
Mode over Matter
The story Aaron Hughes tells in From Seminary to University (2020) is at once archival and timely, not because it presumes to transport the past into the present or mine for prescriptive insights from thinkers long gone but because it “provide[s] a historical work that accounts for ‘how’ as opposed to ‘what’” (13). In presenting a narrative arc for the study of religion in Canada, the book offers a model of how nuanced historiography might attend…
Speaking Theory to Power
Religious studies scholars invested in something called “method and theory” seem intent on remaining stuck in a conversation dictated by proving our political worth in the world. That desire to move outside the walls of the academy ironically keeps us trapped inside one of its smallest and most unfortunate corners, where a theory/praxis binary is manufactured and propagated, kept alive by our personal anxieties about our professional value. My co…
Critical Conversations
The dubious anxiety of scholarly relevance
Based on comments made as part of a plenary roundtable at the 2023 annual meeting of the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, this brief essay examines the discourse on the public relevance of religious studies scholarship. Specifically, it identifies the anxieties present in such discussions and the false theory-praxis binary on which they rely
Thinking Structurally and Inventively about the Changing Same
On “Evidence” and Authenticity Claims in Paranormal TV History
K. Merinda Simmons talks with media studies scholars Matt Boyd Smith and Stefania Marghitu about “Evidence” and Authenticity Claims in Paranormal TV History
Philosophy (15 obras) · Sociology (14 obras) · Epistemology (12 obras) · Philosophy (8 obras) · Art (6 obras) · Religion and Society Interactions (6 obras) · History (5 obras) · Political science (5 obras) · Aesthetics (4 obras) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (4 obras)