Thursday, November 8, 2007

6:30-8:00 Plenary: "Evangelicalism and Liberalism in the Public Sphere" (Elabash Recital Hall)

Key Note Speaker: Michael Warner, Professor of English and American Studies, Yale University, author of Publics and Counterpublics; The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer

Respondent: Stanley Aronowitz, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education; Director of the Center for Study of Culture, Technology and Work at CUNY Graduate Center, author of How Class Works and founding editor of Duke University's Social Text

Moderator: Dominic Wetzel, PhD Candidate (ABD) in Sociology at CUNY Graduate Center

Friday, November 9, 2007

9:30-10:15 Registration and Coffee (C level, Rm 203)

10:15-12:00 Panel I: Sexualities, Fundamentalisms and the Question of Categories

This panel will interrogate the ways in which sexuality is deployed to constitute the category of fundamentalism, as well as the presumed liberalism of modernity.

David Harrington Watt, Associate Professor of History at Temple University

Lila Abu-Lughod, Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University

Minoo Moallem, Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Jasbir K. Puar, Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Geography, Rutgers University

12:00-1:00 Lunch

1:00-2:45 Panel II: Secularism, Religion, and Politics

This panel will discuss the situation in which conservative religions have become politicized as "effective" resistances to discourses of secularism.

Janet Jakobsen, Full Professor and Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women

Laura Levitt, Associate Professor of Religion and Director of Jewish Studies at Temple University

Saadia Toor, Assistant Professor of Sociology, College of Staten Island, CUNY

Richard Kim, Associate Editor, The Nation

Moderator: Rupal Oza, Director of the Women and Gender Studies Program at Hunter College, CUNY

3:00-4:45 Panel III: Religion and Sexualities: Institutions and Practices

This panel will examine the situations of various religious institutions and their relationship with sexuality (e.g. sex education, AIDS in Africa, lib theology in Latin America, homosexuality in US, mass incarceration).

Margaret Cerullo, Professor Sociology at Hampshire College

David Dyson, Minister of Lafayette Ave. Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn

M. Jacqui Alexander, Professor of Women and Gender Studies, New College, University of Toronto

Rev. Vivian Nixon, Minister, Mt. Olive African Methodist Episcopal Church

Moderator: Joe Rollins, Associate Professor of Political Science at Queens College, CUNY

4:45-5:00 Coffee Break

5:00-6:45 Panel IV: Secularism, Science, and Modernities

This panel will examine the ways in which science has become a contested arena of religious resistance to secularism---particularly around issues, like stem-cell research, that have a tie to sexuality---and the implications it has for modernity and its Enlightenment narrative.

Ann Burlein, Visiting Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley/University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Dominic Wetzel, PhD Candidate (ABD) in Sociology at CUNY Graduate Center

Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professor of History and of Women's Studies; Chair, Studies of Women, Gender & Sexuality, Harvard University

Moderator: Patricia Ticineto Clough, Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies, Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY

7:00 Reception (Rm 5414)