17. Competing Economies in Studies of Identity and Religion

Discourses of Crisis and the Study of Religion - Lauren Horn Griffin

K. Merinda Simmons [+-]
University of Alabama
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K. Merinda Simmons is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Graduate Director of the Religion in Culture MA Program at the University of Alabama. Her books include Changing the Subject: Writing Women across the African Diaspora (Ohio State UP, 2014), The Trouble with Post-Blackness (co-edited with Houston A. Baker, Jr., Columbia UP, 2015), and Race and New Modernisms (co-authored with James A. Crank, Bloomsbury, 2019). She is editor of the book series Concepts in the Study of Religion: Critical Primers (Equinox).

Description

Demonstrating the ways in which discourses of “crisis” in the academy are necessarily economically inflected, this chapter explores the roles that considerations of class play in identity studies more broadly. Specifically, the essay shows how identitarian claims (so frequently invoked in crisis-rhetoric) too often foreclose the intersectional approaches those claims nominally advance. This foreclosure occurs when the former employs analyses of specific economies of meaning to the exclusion of specific economies of capital. Intersectionality, however, demands active attention to the structural apparatuses constituting both economies simultaneously. Different and more interesting work becomes possible when those modes of economy are neither conflated nor dichotomized.

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Citation

Simmons, K. Merinda. 17. Competing Economies in Studies of Identity and Religion. Discourses of Crisis and the Study of Religion. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. Mar 2025. ISBN 9781800505315. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=43947. Date accessed: 29 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.43947. Mar 2025

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