Browsing by Author "Scharnick-Udemans, Lee-Shae S."

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    Feminist pandemic pedagogies: Podcasting and the study of religion
    (Association for the Study of Religion in Southern Africa, 2021) Scharnick-Udemans, Lee-Shae S.
    In this articleI will explore and share my pedagogical practices and ex-periences as a feminist scholar of religion, within the context of a voluntary postgraduate reading group, during the first nine months of the Covid-19 pandemic. The article is structured in two parts. The first part offers a reflection of the teaching approaches that inspired and enabled the production of a podcast about the study of religion from the perspective of black African students and scholars of religion. The second part conceptualizes the pro-duction of apodcast as a feminist pedagogical experiment and reflects on this process alongsidefeminist pedagogical principles. While the orientation of this article is tentative and reflexive, it advances the argument that because of the commitment to social justice that is inherent to feminist approaches to scholarship and pedagogy, feminist scholars are generally poised to work within the contexts of crisis.
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    TV is the devil, the devil is on TV: Wild religion and wild media in South Africa
    (Association for the Study of Religion in Southern Africa, 2018) Scharnick-Udemans, Lee-Shae S.
    In keeping with trends in the academy and the rapidly increasing presence, power, and persuasion of digital and electronic media on the African continent and in the global economy, the study of religion and the media in South Africa has become a flourishing field of intellectual inquiry. The expanse of the field in terms of approaches, both methodological and theoretical, demonstrates the multiple and complex interactions between religion and the media in a diverse range of societies and settings. In light of its recent history of apartheid and transition into democracy in the middle 1990s, when paradigmatic constitutional and political changes took place in which the relationship between religion and the media was reconstituted, the South African context, in particular, is ripe for exploring media technology and practices in relation to the political economy of the sacred. This essay pays tribute to David Chidester by testing the possibilities of his theory of �wild religion� against two vignettes of wild media in South Africa. The first, characterized as TV is the devil explores the apartheid government�s pre-emptive religiously saturated ban on television. The second example, described as the devil is on TV assesses viewers� responses to the television program, Lucifer. I argue that when read with Chidester�s theorization of the �wild ambivalence of the sacred�, these examples evoke the hitherto under-explored wild character of both religion and the media.