Publications by Courtney O'Dell-Chaib
Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science, 2019
In response to Lisa Sideris's provocative new book Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge and th... more In response to Lisa Sideris's provocative new book Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge and the Natural World and in conversation with voices from feminist technoscience, this article challenges the deracinated wonder of new cosmology encounters in two senses. First, by tracing how it is uprooted from critical perspectives on scientific knowledge production. And second, by contending deracinated wonder is ripped from cultural and historical contexts thus erasing embodied inequalities. Deracinated wonder attached to uncritical forms of science, I argue, solidifies new cosmology as an investment in white environmentalism by directing religion and ecology away from pluralities of encounter and the affective weight of environmental degradation and environmental racism.
Courtney O’Dell-Chaib considers how toxic materials complicate conceptions of “sacred natures” th... more Courtney O’Dell-Chaib considers how toxic materials complicate conceptions of “sacred natures” through their ability to ooze beyond categories such as nature/culture, human/nonhuman, sacred/profane. In conversation with voices in material feminisms and affect theory, O’Dell-Chaib suggests possible avenues for navigating our toxic immersions.
Bulletin for the Study of Religion, 2017
Evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, that humans have a genetically in... more Evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, that humans have a genetically influenced emotional affiliation with life and life-like processes, for some time has invigorated a prominent strain of scholarship within religion and ecology that taps into the affective dimensions of our evolutionary histories. Our biophilic tendencies coupled with the awe, wonder, and reverence evoked by these religiously resonant cosmologies, they argue, provide occasions for cultivating ethical investments rooted in genetic kinship. However, much of this work that adopts biophilia assumes a “healthy” animal-other and rarely affiliates with the ill, disabled, and mutated creatures impacted by ecological degradation. In conversation with Donovan Schaefer’s provocative new book Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power and his engagement with biophilia, this paper considers possibilities for addressing aversion to animals impacted by ecological collapse through Schaefer’s understanding of affects as not merely adaptive, but embedded within complex economies of embodiment and power.
VDM Verlag, 2008
This book examines the impact of chronic illness on the experiences of motherhood through qualita... more This book examines the impact of chronic illness on the experiences of motherhood through qualitative interviews with mothers with multiple sclerosis (MS). Interviews focus on issues pertaining to the impact MS has on chronically-ill women's perceptions of mothering, identity, their bodies, and the medical establishment. This research contributes to scholarship on feminist analysis of mothering, identity, and health care.
Syllabi by Courtney O'Dell-Chaib
Conference Papers by Courtney O'Dell-Chaib
In response to Lisa Sideris’ provocative new book Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge and the... more In response to Lisa Sideris’ provocative new book Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge and the Natural World and in conversation with voices from feminist technoscience, this paper challenges the “deracinated wonder” of new cosmology encounters in two senses. One, by contending affective encounters with nonhuman others are historically resonant, embodied, and difficult to see represented by a conception of wonder divorced from quotidian concerns. Two, by arguing that bodies carrying alternative environmental histories (black, brown, female, queer, and disabled) have not inherited the type of nature and its intimacies that new cosmology movements assume is universal. Tracing the affective structure of environmental trauma as historical, embodied, public, and ever-present, I push beyond normative conceptions awe and reverence towards recognizing the complex, often deeply painful, intimacies with nonhuman others that are attached to long histories of environmental injustice.
In conversation with Sara Ahmed and Rob Nixon, this collaborative paper considers the material an... more In conversation with Sara Ahmed and Rob Nixon, this collaborative paper considers the material and affective politics of levee systems in two case studies. The first examines affective orientations towards (dis)placement in the 2011 decision to activate the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway and flood the black community of Pinhook, MO. The second considers the affective economy of fear within a Houston suburb levee district surrounded by water in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Here we trace levee systems as lines of white investment, barriers to both encroaching water and racial difference, that materially and affectively envelope certain white communities while spilling-into communities of color. Together we consider what Nixon calls the “environmental politics of permeation and duration;” (2011:63) how levee systems temporally function to both further entrench bodies within legacies of racial injustice and determine possible futures for generations to come.
Little work has been done within religious studies, particularly outside limited theological enga... more Little work has been done within religious studies, particularly outside limited theological engagements with the discourse of trauma studies, to address environmental trauma and grief. Thinking with feminist, queer, and critical race resources that examine trauma as public culture rather than solely private experience, this paper begins to craft a vocabulary for religion and ecology that addresses how communities are negotiating lost histories and the ghosts of violent and complicated ties with American landscapes that affectively shape encounters with environments.
This paper considers the quandary environmental disasters lend to hopeful activism. Resisting apo... more This paper considers the quandary environmental disasters lend to hopeful activism. Resisting apocalyptic rhetoric in favor of thinking through disaster, I ask how making-with disaster changes our commitments, projects, and ethics in religion and ecology.
In conversation with Susan Sontag, Ann Cvetkovich, Lauren Berlant, and Donna Haraway, this paper continues to champion the possibilities affect theory offers to the future of religion and ecology by considering affective environments mired in exhaustion and anxiety, by thinking through what disasters do to a body/ communities of bodies, and by asking how disaster trauma might impact affective orientations. For some scholars in religion and ecology the subdiscipline serves, in part, as religiopoeisis-crafting a possible civic home for those who feel ethical obligations to care for biodiversity. Haraway, however, offers a provocative reminder that all making is making-with, sympoiesis, as “critters-human and not- become-with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthly worlding and unworlding.” How might religion and ecology make-with disaster and those dispossessed/disregarded by the aftermath?
For spectator bodies invested in witnessing to suffering, how might we resist both “edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures” by “staying with the trouble” of environmental disaster?
Pushing the limits of kinship intimacies within religion and ecology, this paper facilitates a co... more Pushing the limits of kinship intimacies within religion and ecology, this paper facilitates a conversation between queer ecologies and disability studies on loving bodies (human and nonhuman) impacted by the toxic economies of ecological disasters like the British Petroleum Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Seeking models for doing kinship differently, I explore ways to think about what Mel Chen calls “improper affiliation,” or intimacies with nonhuman animals marked as abject other, remainders, unloveable.
Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, that humans have a genetically influenced... more Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, that humans have a genetically influenced emotional affiliation with life and life-like processes, for some time has invigorated a prominent strain of scholarship within religion and ecology that taps into the affective dimensions of our evolutionary histories. Our biophilic tendencies coupled with the awe, wonder, and reverence evoked by these religiously resonant cosmologies, they argue, provide occasions for cultivating ethical investments rooted in genetic kinship. However, much of this work that adopts biophilia assumes a “healthy” animal-other and rarely affiliates with the ill, disabled, and mutated creatures impacted by ecological degradation. In conversation with Donovan Schaefer’s provocative new book Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power and his engagement with biophilia, this paper considers possibilities for addressing aversion to animals impacted by ecological collapse through Schaefer’s understanding of affects as not merely adaptive, but embedded within complex economies of embodiment and power.
This paper considers how some new materialist and affect theory perspectives contribute to discus... more This paper considers how some new materialist and affect theory perspectives contribute to discussions within spiritual ecofeminism of what it means to be ethically aligned with the non-human. Integrating the most recent religion and ecology texts that are innovatively deploying new materialist and affect theory, this paper seeks after new avenues for contemporary ecotheory by asking: How are modalities of encounter between human bodies, non-human beings, and the inorganic theorized from new materialist/affect perspectives? How can ecotheorists better advocate for valuing the organic and inorganic forces around us that contribute to the health of ecosystems? How might theorists expand their conceptions of ecosystem to include the immanent interactions between unanticipated participants like inorganic matter and nets of affective intensities?
Reflecting on Edward O. Wilson’s conception of biophilia as our human innate tendency to be orien... more Reflecting on Edward O. Wilson’s conception of biophilia as our human innate tendency to be oriented towards life, this paper considers theoretical and practical avenues for cultivating biophilia after ecological collapse. Centering on the damaged Gulf of Mexico coast after Hurricane Katrina and the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, this paper asks what does it mean to love life in devastated landscapes? Rather than articulating a reciprocal relationship with the natural world that might teach us what it means to be human, how are our ontological conceptions within religion and ecology challenged by thinking and teaching the human as porously, intimately, open to the tremendous vitality of nonhuman beings?
Using Lauren Berlant’s conception of the “impasse” of Cruel Optimism to think through the “precar... more Using Lauren Berlant’s conception of the “impasse” of Cruel Optimism to think through the “precarious present” of Gulf coast lives, this paper suggests that hoping for a reciprocal relationship with the natural world has become our cruel optimism. Our attachment to a romanticized nature, one that is perhaps unrecognizable in our ecological realities, becomes the impasse that blocks us from enacting different hopeful alternatives. When our idealized imagined relationships between humans and nonhuman others are a far cry from the realities of our troubling interactions, how do we continue to orient ourselves towards life? When crisis becomes ordinary routine, what is a liveable life on the Gulf coast? In this paper, I argue that cultivating biophilia, love of life, in devastated landscapes is perhaps only possible through desiring improper intimacies.
Editorial Roles by Courtney O'Dell-Chaib
Jugaad: A Material Religions Project
Jodi Shaw theorizes the sacred in South Indian Hindu temples by maneuvering affect theory and her... more Jodi Shaw theorizes the sacred in South Indian Hindu temples by maneuvering affect theory and her current ethnographic work in Cidambaram into dialogue. Shaw directs our attention to the pre-verbal and extra-linguistic elements of temple encounters in order to shape a sense of the sacred as "visceral conversations."
https://jugaad.pub/unfinished-ness-ritual-temple/
Jugaad: A Material Religions Project
Suvrathan emphasizes the importance of tracing the complex life-histories of religious structure... more Suvrathan emphasizes the importance of tracing the complex life-histories of religious structures as a way of understanding the ever-changing patterns of religious practice and cultural memory formation.
https://jugaad.pub/tracing-the-many-lives-of-religious-structures/
Jugaad: A Material Religions Project
Jaimie Gunderson assesses the interplay between body and visual representations at the Sanctuary ... more Jaimie Gunderson assesses the interplay between body and visual representations at the Sanctuary of Apollo at Klaros. In conversation with aesthetic theory and classical studies, Gunderson suggests that visitors to the Klarian landscape were implicated in two competing sensual paradigms, which enabled them not only to see, but to feel, Apollo.
https://jugaad.pub/feeling-apollo-the-sensual-paradigms-of-landscape-at-the-sanctuary-of-apollo-at-klaros/
Jugaad: A Material Religions Project
Jenna Gray-Hildenbrand and Martha Smith Roberts investigate how the hula hoop has become both an ... more Jenna Gray-Hildenbrand and Martha Smith Roberts investigate how the hula hoop has become both an empowering tool for embodied practical spirituality rooted in metaphysical religiosity and a basis for a thriving community connected not by a shared dogma but by a common practice. They argue that the growth of the hooping subculture lies in its ability to nurture the diverse spiritual experiences of individual hoopers and to build an inclusive hooping community (composed of both spiritually and recreationally motivated hoopers).
https://jugaad.pub/hula-hoop-spiritualities-social-media_2/
Jugaad: A Material Religions Project
Prea Persaud argues that "jhandis", triangular flags placed on bamboo and planted near homes and ... more Prea Persaud argues that "jhandis", triangular flags placed on bamboo and planted near homes and temples, are not just a religious symbol but an identity marker that indicates the presence of Indo-Caribbeans. Indo-Caribbeans use jhandis as both a proclamation of their faith as well as a way to combat what they view as attempts to erase their culture and history.
https://jugaad.pub/cultural-battlefields-jhandi-flags-and-the-indo-caribbean-fight-for-recognition/
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Publications by Courtney O'Dell-Chaib
Syllabi by Courtney O'Dell-Chaib
Conference Papers by Courtney O'Dell-Chaib
In conversation with Susan Sontag, Ann Cvetkovich, Lauren Berlant, and Donna Haraway, this paper continues to champion the possibilities affect theory offers to the future of religion and ecology by considering affective environments mired in exhaustion and anxiety, by thinking through what disasters do to a body/ communities of bodies, and by asking how disaster trauma might impact affective orientations. For some scholars in religion and ecology the subdiscipline serves, in part, as religiopoeisis-crafting a possible civic home for those who feel ethical obligations to care for biodiversity. Haraway, however, offers a provocative reminder that all making is making-with, sympoiesis, as “critters-human and not- become-with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthly worlding and unworlding.” How might religion and ecology make-with disaster and those dispossessed/disregarded by the aftermath?
For spectator bodies invested in witnessing to suffering, how might we resist both “edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures” by “staying with the trouble” of environmental disaster?
Editorial Roles by Courtney O'Dell-Chaib
https://jugaad.pub/unfinished-ness-ritual-temple/
https://jugaad.pub/tracing-the-many-lives-of-religious-structures/
https://jugaad.pub/feeling-apollo-the-sensual-paradigms-of-landscape-at-the-sanctuary-of-apollo-at-klaros/
https://jugaad.pub/hula-hoop-spiritualities-social-media_2/
https://jugaad.pub/cultural-battlefields-jhandi-flags-and-the-indo-caribbean-fight-for-recognition/
In conversation with Susan Sontag, Ann Cvetkovich, Lauren Berlant, and Donna Haraway, this paper continues to champion the possibilities affect theory offers to the future of religion and ecology by considering affective environments mired in exhaustion and anxiety, by thinking through what disasters do to a body/ communities of bodies, and by asking how disaster trauma might impact affective orientations. For some scholars in religion and ecology the subdiscipline serves, in part, as religiopoeisis-crafting a possible civic home for those who feel ethical obligations to care for biodiversity. Haraway, however, offers a provocative reminder that all making is making-with, sympoiesis, as “critters-human and not- become-with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthly worlding and unworlding.” How might religion and ecology make-with disaster and those dispossessed/disregarded by the aftermath?
For spectator bodies invested in witnessing to suffering, how might we resist both “edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures” by “staying with the trouble” of environmental disaster?
https://jugaad.pub/unfinished-ness-ritual-temple/
https://jugaad.pub/tracing-the-many-lives-of-religious-structures/
https://jugaad.pub/feeling-apollo-the-sensual-paradigms-of-landscape-at-the-sanctuary-of-apollo-at-klaros/
https://jugaad.pub/hula-hoop-spiritualities-social-media_2/
https://jugaad.pub/cultural-battlefields-jhandi-flags-and-the-indo-caribbean-fight-for-recognition/
https://jugaad.pub/contemporary-urban-necro-politics-and-ritual-negotiation/
https://jugaad.pub/uncanny-images-and-the-literalism-of-modernity/
https://jugaad.pub/flaying-the-second-skin-mormon-underwear-and-intersectionality/
master and PhD students, early career academics,
faculty, and non-academics. 11 seminars engage
affect studies in generative interface with performance
pedagogy, queer and trans theory, critical theories
of race, anticolonial methods, media theory, trauma
studies, food ethics, political theory, sound studies,
medieval studies, histories of emotion, ethnographic
techniques, sensuous scholarship, film theory, religious
studies, environmental humanities, educational
theory, disability studies, feminist philosophies of care,
decolonial and transnational feminisms, posthuman
theories, post/qualitative methodologies, rhetorical
theory, and more.