Counter-Media - Spring 2025 Syllabus
As we gather, we honor and acknowledge that the University of Colorado’s four campuses are on the traditional territories and ancestral homelands of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Ute, Apache, Comanche, Kiowa, Lakota, Pueblo and Shoshone Nations. Further, we acknowledge the 48 contemporary tribal nations historically tied to the lands that comprise what is now called Colorado.
This is not a statement of property. Land is no property. Land is no territory. Land was meant to be free.
The CMRC Seminar
There are many seminars at the university. Why add one more? What is the point of yet another research gathering? At the dawn of a new academic year, we wonder under what skies we have been called to meet now? Through the years we have come to understand our fellowship beyond the conventional modes of academic assembly. What began as a mere reading group has matured into a community of deep sharing and listening, a forum where we don’t horde knowledge and confer degrees. Our Center has achieved a lot in its short history and we will persist in our commitment to lead research in the study of media and religion, but we wish to deepen the radicalism we have been long cultivating in our praxis, and to explore in new ways how the understanding of global religious and mediatic imaginaries can open doors to liberation, in our community and far beyond.
In this space, we have developed an intimate intellectual community and an approach to academic fellowship with multiple tasks, goals, and styles. Over the years, we have supported each other through personal and political crises, read and edited each other’s work, studied authors that deeply challenged the canons in our fields, and rehearsed work before publications and conference presentations. In fact, we believe now more than ever that before the research grants, the polished publications, and the conference talks, there is first the small, slow, and nonetheless audacious incubation of the seminar space.
Moving forward, we wish to double down on the audacity of our space. We ask you to consider with us a simple yet profound question: what does it mean to hold a seminar in the tumult of our times? What should it mean to think in times of live genocide, of climate catastrophe, and the whatever-it-takes doctrine of a rabid capitalism?
There is no better time to read, think, and write than when things seem to fray at the edges, when exhaustion overwhelms our resolve, and when cynicism cripples our imagination. Our project, if we have one, is to smuggle will in an age of catastrophism. Yes, Trump won, fascism is on the rise everywhere, wars are fought by arsonists disguised as prophets of peace, climate destruction is unstoppable, racism and misogyny are as rampant as ever, democracy is a farcical battlefield of so-called divine injunctions, our curricula still feel like we are trespassing into the master’s mansion, and our universities teach social justice in classrooms only to repress students when they take the lessons outdoors.
Yet, we have a duty to begin again and stay the course no matter what. We don’t think and write when it is sunny outside. We are the lucky ones because our battle toolbox has words and ideas and because the chairs we sit on are little thrones we must exorcize to shake off prize and privilege. We must savor our intellectual encounter and greet it with urgency as if it were to disappear the day after.
Spring Seminar Focus
This spring we will devote the seminar to the new project “Religion In Emergent Media Spaces”, a three-year research and outreach initiative funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and designed to build infrastructure for media experimentation at the intersection of religion and liberatory social change.
In this project, we will cultivate the practice of what we call “counter-media”—an approach to the making and study of mediated communication that is centered in relationship and community rather than in the demands of particular media forms or their dominant business models. We are interested in what media forms, spaces, aesthetics, and artifice are possible when the task is not restricted to critically assessing the flaws in our media systems. Our thinking about the “counter” seeks to locate and explore imaginaries of communication and participation that open up liberatory futures. Counter-media is not anti-media, nor is it an invitation to non-communication or non-participation in media. We turn to the prefix of the “counter” to locate alternative media practices and pedagogies that resist the dominant logics of technologists and the exclusionary politics of knowledge production—particularly in the contexts of ongoing shifts in the location of mediated religious authority.
The concept of counter-media emerges from many years of rethinking our Center's academic seminar as a space of collective study and insurgent learning. Usually, a seminar functions largely within an institutional setting regulated by credit, grades, degrees, disciplinary training, and conventions of publishing and presenting. We have challenged ourselves to expand the idea of what a graduate seminar could be outside, or in excess, of these overly fluent logistics and orientations. For a world profoundly in need of critical, practical reorientations to religion and media, what purpose should a seminar serve in and outside the university? How helpful is it to think through the idea of the “counter” as in counter-media or counter-publics? What makes something “counter”, in relation to what, and for whom? Historically, there have been many counter movements and oppositional currents representing the full political and cultural spectrum. What can be different about a set of practices and protocols we might want to call, counter-media? Do counter-media exist independently from dominant media, or do they also deliberately engage and challenge those media? What constitutes counter-media? Are they the same as alternative media or is there something unique about our conception of “the counter” that defies other definitions?
The heart of this project is also an investment in the weekly CMRC seminar, already a flourishing convergence of scholars, students, and media practitioners. By opening the door of the seminar to an expanded community, the project will advance it from an eminent academic space to a convergence point for a wider range of participants. These will include prominent thinkers joining us as visiting fellows and media practitioners who will develop innovative media interventions in collaboration with our Center’s early-career researchers. Along the way, the Center will experiment with its own practices of media-making. Taken together, the elements of this project will establish the Center as a site for both incubating impactful media practices around religion and rethinking the basic premises of the academic seminar.
Unlike other semesters, our seminar will rely less on readings and be more hands on this spring. We will discuss the concept of the “Counter” as it relates to publics, media, religion, communication, and community. We will also work together to identify examples of counter-media and present them to the group. We will devote a special issue of the center’s publication Rhythms to write articles on these examples.
This weekly Seminar is a major component of the research and teaching mission of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture. It brings together faculty, graduate students, and visiting fellows from a variety of academic fields with an interest in media and religion. Center fellows explore leading literature in a variety of academic fields, including media studies, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, social theory, and philosophy. Students also receive concrete training in research development, methodology, and analysis, and are mentored through the development of conference presentations and publications.
CMRC Publication
RHYTHMS: The first issue Rhythms was published in December 2022 and focused on the theme of “writing in times of urgency.” The second issue on "Concepts Under Repair” came out in December 2023. The prompt for that issue was: what is a concept you are interested in repairing, maintaining, resuscitating, or abolishing for the sake of repairing something else? This spring, we will work on the third issue related to the counter-media project.
Expectations
Fellows are encouraged to get involved in center projects over the course of each semester. Please consult with the faculty of the center on how you can best use your time and expertise in these projects or if you have other ideas for collaboration and outreach.
Tentative schedule and readings
Week 1: 1/23 Introductions of Faculty and Fellows; Discussion of the “Religion In
Emergent Media Spaces” project
Week 2: 1/30 On Publicity, Publicness, Publics and Counterpublics.
Readings: Michael Warner, (2002) “Publics and Counterpublics” Public Culture 14(1): 49–90
Week 3: 2/6 On the concept of the Counter, the popular, and lived religion.
Readings: Introduction to the Second Edition of Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street
Week 4: 2/13 Examples of Counter-Media Presentations and Discussion
Week 5: 2/20 Examples of Counter-Media Presentations and Discussion
Week 6: 2/27 Examples of Counter-Media Presentations and Discussion
Week 7: 3/6 Examples of Counter-Media Presentations and Discussion
Week 8: 3/13 Examples of Counter-Media Presentations and Discussion
Week 9: 3/20 Examples of Counter-Media Presentations and Discussion
Week 10: 3/27 SPRING BREAK; NO MEETING
Week 11: 4/3 Examples of Counter-Media Presentations and Discussion
Week 12: 4/10 Examples of Counter-Media Presentations and Discussion
Week 13: 4/17 Religion and the Therapeutic
Week 14: 4/24 What is the counter in counter-media? Discussion
CMRC End of Semester Lunch: May 1