I agree with the references’ articulations of how the way religion impacts the perceived (de-) humanisation of a subject always already intersects with their other identity categories (either imposed or self-ascribed). (Kwame Anthony Appiah: Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question), 2014; Challenging Race, Religion, and Stereotypes in Classroom, 2016; Rustamova, 2022; Rekis, 2023) I would be more invested than some of them, though, in how, more often than not, it is read as a proxy for race and class.
It made me sad that Simran Jeet Singh felt that he needed to follow a respectability politics strategy and that it was on him and his actions to prove certain stereotypes wrong.(Challenging Race, Religion, and Stereotypes in Classroom, 2016) It makes me concerned about the classroom pedagogy he practices and how it might push students to think that this is the only way to react to their dehumanisation. I hope my students don’t feel it is ever on them to disprove the prejudices we might hold as a community. That’s collective work that should be done as a group in a space held by the tutors.
Having grown up in Peru and Brazil, it has always surprised me how rarely religion appears in teaching here and how much students think it is something you must leave out the door before becoming an artist or an intellectual. During my education in Brazil, religion was always present. Liberation pedagogy was very present, and its relation to Liberation Theology was openly discussed. My primary and secondary school was run by liberation theology nuns who were fierce Marxists and feminists and openly talked about how my middle-class private school existed mainly to provide money for the school they were really invested in. A free school for d/Deaf children, which they ran. This meant we usually had d/Deaf students, and everything was organised so seamlessly that even in a country with massive prejudice against disabled people, none of the access infrastructure felt like a favour. It feels very different to have grown with a clear association that certain forms of radical and sophisticated political thought can’t be or have chosen not to be separated from religion. That religion is not an epistemic void.(Rekis, 2023)
In the UK, it’s weird to me how Paulo Freire is discussed with no mention of his Christianity. In art history in Brazil, we read biblical passages in order to understand medieval painting. We explored the fusion of Judaism and Hellenism, which became Christianity and then Neo-Platonism, to understand ideas of light in constructing gothic churches and aesthetics. Islam restrictions on representation and the symbolism of the cave in order to look at calligraphy, abstraction and the Moorish churches of Spain. How can you understand Brazilian music, performance and theatre traditions without studying Candomblé and Umbanda? How can we read philosophy and use Kant’s aesthetics (not that I’m a fan of his), ignoring his Lutheranism? I’ve become more aware of not unconsciously erasing the religious context for intellectual and art practices when I bring them to my students. Why would you read Judith Butler without considering her Judaism? Sara Ahmed and Rehana Zaman’s writings on their practices and thinking in relation to Islam? Evan Ifekoya’s work as a spiritual practitioner and her relation to Yoruba religion? Paul Thek and Peter Hujar’s Catholicism?
Bibliography
Challenging Race, Religion, and Stereotypes in Classroom (2016). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CAOKTo_DOk (Accessed: 23 May 2025).
Kwame Anthony Appiah: Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question) (2014). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2et2KO8gcY (Accessed: 23 May 2025).
Rekis, J. (2023)’‘Religious Identity and Epistemic Injustice: An Intersectional Account’’, Hypatia, 38(4), pp. 779–800. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2023.86.
Rustamova, F. (2022)’‘Islam, Women and Sport: The Case of Visible Muslim Women – Religion and Global Societ’’, Religion and Global Society – Understanding religion and its relevance in world affairs, 22 September. Available at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/religionglobalsociety/2022/09/islam-women-and-sport-the-case-of-visible-muslim-women/ (Accessed: 23 May 2025).
Dear Andrea
I hope that you are well and appreciate your engagement with the formative submission and feedback. The format for this formative feedback is a 300-word maximum summary with 3 questions and or provocations supported by a resource for each item.
Please find below my feedback, which I hope that you find useful:
LO1: Critically evaluate institutional, national and global perspectives of equality and diversity in relation to your academic practice context. [Enquiry] – At this stage you appear very engaged in evaluating – and improving – institutional perspectives on equality and diversity in relation to your international students, and you relate this also to national and global viewpoints. Your writing on this is potent and could become more powerful – see my feedback below.
LO2: Manifest your understanding of practices of inequity, their impact, and the implications for your professional context. [Knowledge] – Your knowledges of inequitable practices and their impact on your students are very strongly implicit within the proposal. With references and clearer framing around your own pedagogical experiences as – see below feedback – this could become a very dynamic part of the proposal. In our tutorial we discussed the possible implications of the situation for your professional context and although this is currently not articulated in the proposal there is scope to include this.
LO3: Articulate the development of your positionality and identity through the lens of inclusive practices. [Communication] – Currently, the proposal reads as very impassioned and written by an author and tutor who cares deeply about the injustices experienced by a particular student group. This does a lot to communicate a ‘sense’ of you. At this stage however, your own positionality and identity don’t yet seem to be included in your proposal – see below feedback please.
LO4: Enact a sustainable transformation that applies intersectional social justice within your practice. [Realisation] – As we discussed in our recent tutorial,although there are the beginnings of a very strong and potentially straightforward intervention using technology, it’s not yet quite clear how, more precisely, you will enact this and who else might be involved and why. Articulating these points would help to strengthen the proposal
Finally, please find some further questions as provocations to support the development of your intervention:
• What would happen to the general standard of the proposal if the many (otherwise valid and important) claims and assertions that you make, surrounding the institutional recruitment practices and the consequences for international students, were referenced by you to show they are drawn from your engagement with reliable sources and / or specific lived experiences (such as specific sessions you taught at certain times in your career). It seems highly probable that this would communicate your insights, knowledges and values as fact-based and, as such, more reliable and trustworthy, and would also position you, as author and pedagog, as being able to take a very objective and leading stance on tackling this problem.
• The post does not seem to have been updated relative to the content of our discussion in our recent tutorial – which is fine if you are pushed for time. Will you include some of the points we discussed such as approaching and potentially collaborating with the English Language team to develop the intervention and will you also find a way to delimit what you think the extent of your involvement with this should be, given that helping students to develop their command of English Language is not officially part of your role? A related question here is: what are your teaching values and how will you promote them within this proposal?
• As we also discussed in our tutorial, it would be great to see clarity around what specific actions you may take to enact the transformation and to communicate these plans clearly to the reader; currently, this reads as a very potent and engaging critique of a pedagogical situation and context, and it would be wonderful to see how you direct your energies to specifying your plans for action.
Regards and take care,
Linda
Hi Andrea
It seems that Linda commented on the wrong post!
I just wanted to say that it is always fascinating to hear about your experience growing up in Brazil and realise how far apart our realities were while growing up in the same place (Sao Paulo), in the same era (1980’s), and as part of the same class, race and gender (white middle-class girls). I am now very curious about the school you went to, and the pedagogy that was so formative in your early years.
I went to a main-stream private school in Sao Paulo where my mother was a Maths teacher, which meant me and my sibling had 100% scholarships. All my school friends were white, visibly abled upper-class kids, baptised at birth by their non-practising Catholic families. I never heard the words liberation or theology at school, let alone both terms together.
But one thing I agree with you is that religion can not be an epistemic void.
In the case of Brazil, disregarding religion and practices of faith would not only be an epistemic loss, but a very dangerous one. In a country where more than a quarter of the population identifies as evangelical Christians and were responsible to bring the far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro to power, faith and politics can not be studied in isolation.
But I have to say that I find very difficult to read or listened to evangelical subjects with openness, in Brazil or elsewhere. My reaction is to dismiss their claims, such as the Earth is flat, as non-sense and disregard their point of view entirely. It is definitely a form of prejudice, one that I am aware of, that Rekis (2023) made me think about it, and that I decided to share with you.
I know what you mean! I wrote this and then I thought, I love liberation theology but Brazil is also the land of “Tradição, Familia e Propriedade”. I think I just wanted to talk how religion is incredibly complex and is not a stage towards atheism being the illuminated goal. I’m with you in my discomfort and actual fear of the homophobic/racist/fascist discourse that permeate a lot of evangelical institutions and believers in Brazil right now, and in some degree the charismatic catholic response. But then I watch something like the doc on mutirões da zona leste, and all the priests joining the workers on the ground and I just want to make sure we don’t forget that religion can also be that. I have had a lot of catholic and muslim students over the years that have felt that their religion had no place at college or in art, when we all live lives permeated by ideologies. I think my post was a reaction to that.
The documentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enYeulGpJJw
It’s a fair point, Andrea, and I’m almost envious of your positionality and the open mind you bring to this topic. In the second part of your blog, there’s something quite romantic in the way you write: “… we read biblical passages in order to understand medieval painting.”
It took me many years, and books, and endless reflection and questioning, to reach a point where I could appreciate any form of religion and begin to see the connection between religion and art or literature in a positive light. I’ve come to recognise that art born out of religion also holds value, talent, and deeper meaning.
You have a unique educational experience, where empowerment and religious epistemic knowledge was championed. Where Rekis writes the problem with having a dominant religion and secular thinking is that it dismisses and misrepresents other faiths. I had this during my schooling days, where all I was taught about was Christianity or Catholicism, but the majority of us never took it seriously. However, if I picked up a Quran or Torah because I was interested in its art and writing, I would immediately be judged (basically shamed). This stops any sort of engagement with faith, especially if you are secular. No wonder when we champion and study people we never consider their faith or practice as their framework.