Name
Making Room for Black Lives Matter in the Religious Studies Curriculum: Interdisciplinarity as a Theological Mandate
Date & Time
Thursday, October 14, 2021, 2:00 PM - 2:50 PM
Description

This presentation presents insights from teaching about Black Lives Matter during the 2020-2021 academic year. In the field of theology and religious studies interdisciplinarity is a given. In Catholic social teaching, for example, the rubric "see-judge-act" for ethical discernment on social issues requires that the person actively seek out diverse resources for the "see" task of getting to know what is going on. However, this can become a stale habit of resorting to the same sources outside one's area of study. This year I incorporated learning about the Black Lives Matter movement in the theology classroom in ways that modeled to students how to make room for robust engagement between journalism and the social sciences and theology and ethics. Some highlights from this year include engaging student generated content in the form of journaling, videos by faculty in other disciplines on what the Black Lives Matter movement meant to their field of study, incorporating institution-wide discussions by experts in a various fields on the topics of reparations, racial justice, and police use of force, and completing assignments that had them bring their own major field of study in conversation with the ethical challenges of this year's protests and the BLM movement as a whole.

Virtual Session Link