Contemplative Studies Panels at AAR Conference: November 18-21, 2023

Spirit Medicine toward Ethical and Decolonial Psychedelic Research and Praxis. Saturday, 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM. Grand Hyatt-Bowie B (2nd Floor).

With private investment in psychedelic development, the FDA anticipating approving the first psychedelic medicine within the next years, U.S. cities decriminalizing enforcement, and corporate psychedelic retreats considered to stimulate employee creativity, in practice, unregulated psychedelic experimentation is becoming popular and more dangerous in the West. Ethical concerns exacerbate the need for safe understanding of these medicines and warn against its use without corresponding evidence and epistemic material abuses and violations against the rights of Indigenous communities. This panel explores Indigenous Spirit medicines and their appropriation in Western psychedelic research and practice, encouraging scholars to explore frameworks for decolonizing psychedelic research. The session considers Indigenous Peoples’ experiences and perspectives, the trajectory of the psychedelic experience and its relation to psychotic events, warnings of drug development and clinical trials, and ethical considerations for research imperative to the resurgence of the therapeutic use of Spirit medicine (aka psychedelics) in the United States.

Presiding
Seth Schermerhorn, Hamilton College

Panelists
Rebecca Mendoza Nunziato, Harvard University 
The White Shaman Mural of Texas: Prepositions of Relationship as Decolonial Praxis

Ari Brouwer, University of Wisconsin – Madison
F. LeRon Shults, University of Agder
The trajectory of psychedelic, spiritual, and psychotic experiences

Yuria Celidwen, University of California, Berkley
Spirit Medicine Framework for Use in Ethical Decolonial Psychedelics

Liberative Uses of the Imagination. Sunday, 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM. San Antonio Convention Center – Room 217B (Meeting Room Level).

In Buddhist philosophy, the imagination is often viewed negatively. It is posited as one of the primary ways ignorance functions, and so, in some basic sense, it’s in virtue of the imagination that we suffer. Yet the imagination is also essential to liberation from suffering. Many different traditions of Buddhist religious practice and meditative cultivation involve forms of imaginative construction. So, in another basic sense, it’s in virtue of the imagination that suffering can come to an end. How do we reconcile the imagination’s negative operation with its liberative use? Does the imagination function in the same ways in both cases? What is at stake in debates about the use and abuse of imaginative construction? To answer these questions, this panel will explore some of the different ways that the imagination functions positively and productively toward the end of liberation in Buddhist philosophy and religious practice.

Presiding
Davey Tomlinson, Villanova University

Panelists
Ian Nicolay, University of Hawaii
Bhāvanā: Contemplative Imagination in Indian Buddhism and Mīmāṃsā Philosophy

Jiang Wu, University of Arizona
Religious Imagination in the Lotus Sutra

Rae Dachille, University of Arizona
Mere Fabrications and Profound Shortcuts: Imagination and Ritual Efficacy in a Fifteenth-Century Tibetan Debate on Body Mandala

Vesna Wallace, University of California, Santa Barbara
Imagining While Caring for the Dead and Reciting the Kālacakratantra

Responding
Catherine Prueitt, University of British Columbia

From Knowledge and Liberation to Unbounded Wholeness through The Great Bliss Queen: In Honor of Anne C. Klein. Sunday, 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM. San Antonio Convention Center – Room 225 (Meeting Room Level).

Over the past two-and-a-half decades, Professor Anne C. Klein has pioneered new pathways in the academic study of Buddhist Studies, Gender Studies, and Contemplative Studies. To honor her celebrated career in the academy, this roundtable convenes scholars and students to discuss her many contributions, including her eight books. Presentations from the six panelists will foreground discrete aspects of the multiple epistemologies at work in Klein’s publications from Geluk discourse between Sautrantika and Madhyamaka in Knowledge and Liberation (1987) and Knowing, Naming, and Negation (1997) to gender-specific ways of knowing in Meeting the Great Bliss Queen (1995) to the logic of the nonconceptual in Unbounded Wholeness (2006) to epistemologies of perfection in her forthcoming, Being Human and a Buddha Too (2023). Each panelist, either as a scholar influenced by her work or as a graduate student mentored by Klein, will discuss how different ways of knowing – first-person, gendered, textualized, and so forth – are present in Klein’s body of work, giving the roundtable discussion a syncretically whole epistemological theme.

Presiding
Michael Sheehy, University of Virginia

Panelists
Sarah Jacoby, Northwestern University

Kali Cape, University of Virginia

Jue Liang, Denison University

Martijn Van Beek, Aarhus University

Learned Foote, Rice University

Renee Ford, Rice University

Responding
Anne C. Klein, Rice University

Beyond Insider/Outsider: Theorizing Practitioners, Scholars, and Critical Methodologies. Sunday, 12:30 PM – 2:30 PM. San Antonio Convention Center – Room 007D (River Level).

This roundtable panel robustly problematized and theorizes methodological approaches used by those known as practitioner-scholars or scholar-practitioners in the field of Tantric Studies. Grappling with and centering practitioner-informed perspectives and methodologies, we examine, identify, confront, and navigate the unique challenges and advantages of this perspective, which can benefit both practitioner-scholars and non-practitioner-scholars. Given the recent turn toward more intersubjective and participatory forms of research, rigorous and theoretically engaged explorations of the scholar as practitioner in Tantric traditions are timely and vital, and can benefit researchers across disciplines in Religious Studies. Exploring traditional and virtual field research, digital Tantra, and medieval textual scholarship, this panel interrogates various collaborative, decolonial, and innovative strategies for practitioner-scholars working in a variety of contexts: in the field with both folk and temple-based traditions, online, with texts, and within the academy itself.

Presiding
Sundari Johansen Hurwitt, California Institute of Integral Studies

Panelists
Sangseraima Ujeed, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Sravana Borkataky-Varma, Harvard University

Anya Golovkova, Lake Forest College

Meera Kachroo, Other

Responding
Jose Cabezon, University of California, Santa Barbara

Contemplative Embodiment Across Traditions. Monday, 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM. Grand Hyatt-Bonham D (3rd Floor).

This papers session addresses the use of contemplative praxis accross disparate religious traditions finding a thematic convergence among them on the ideal of lived exteriority.

The first paper address the seventeenth-century kabbalist R. Naftali Bakrakh of Frankfurt and the contemplative practices he developed in the wake of the well-known mystic Isaac Luria.

The second paper examines the role of contemplative practices in the proposed construction of transcendental and inherently gendered devotional subjectives in the 16th century Gaudīya Vaiṣṇava tradition.

The third paper addresses contemplative praxis within the Ruist (=Confucian) tradition. It focuses on the 11th century Ruist, Cheng Yi, as he engages in quiet-sitting and other practices grounded in the central mindset of “reverence(敬).”

The fourth paper draws from evangelical religiosity to suggest a shift in focus away from understanding religious practice in hermeneutical terms towards instead an embodied human encounter.

Presiding
Harold D. Roth, Brown University
“Contemplative Embodiment Across Traditions”

Panelists
August Higgins, Oblate School of Theology
The Problem of the Body for a People of the Book: Refiguring Human Experience and the Evangelical Imagination

Avraham Kelman, Stanford University
Contemplating the Exterior in Early Modern Kabbalah

Bin Song, Washington College
A Study of Cheng Yi’s Quiet-sitting Meditation and Other Contemplative Practices in the Ru (Confucian) Context

Eileen Goddard, University of California, Santa Barbara
Contemplative Constructions & Expressions of Female Devotional Subjectivities in the Gaudīya Vaiṣṇava Tradition

Responding
Lorilai Biernacki, University of Colorado

The Platonic Tradition, Nature and the Environment. Monday, 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM. San Antonio Convention Center – Room 214A (Meeting Room Level).

The Platonic tradition has, throughout history, offered a radically alternative understanding of the relationship between humans and nature, and between humans and non-human animals. This panel invites papers that explore both historical and contemporary instances of the Platonic conceptualisation of nature. We encourage contributions that explore the contemporary application of this tradition for the task of reconceptualising our collective understanding of nature. Exploration of the relationship between Platonic realism across multiple religious traditions is encouraged, as well as constructive proposals for inter-religious ecologies. Papers may draw upon sources from antiquity to the present, ranging from the philosophical and theological to the poetic and artistic.

Presiding
Alexander Hampton, University of Toronto

Douglas Hedley, University of Cambridge

Panelists
Jacob Sherman, California Institute of Integral Studies
At Once the Poet and the Poem: Coleridge’s Regenerate Natural Philosophy

Annalea Thiessen, University of Chicago
Nature Beyond Anthropocentrism: Logos, Kinship and Flourishing in Maximus the Confessor

Seth Hart, Durham University
Goethe’s Platonic Natural Philosophy: How Goethean Science Provides an Alternative Conception of the Cosmos

Aviva Farkas, Independent Scholar
Shakespeare’s Bookish Rulers: Philosophy, Power, and Nature in the Henry VI Plays and *The Tempest*