Theory in a Time of Excess - Beyond Reflection and Explanation in Religious Studies Scholarship - Aaron W. Hughes
21. Theory is the Best Accessory: Branding and the Power of Scholarly Compartmentalization
Theory in a Time of Excess - Beyond Reflection and Explanation in Religious Studies Scholarship - Aaron W. Hughes
Leslie Dorrough Smith [+]
Avila University
Leslie Dorrough Smith is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Avila University, USA, where she is also the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She is the author of Compromising Positions: Political Sex Scandals and American Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2020), Constructing “Data” in Religious Studies: Examining the Architecture of the Academy (Equinox Publishing, 2019), and Righteous Rhetoric: Sex, Speech and the Politics of Concerned Women for America (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Description
If we are to seriously consider what circumstances cause so many scholars of religion to tout themselves as people who “do” method and theory – and yet nevertheless end up with analyses that are relatively empty of both – then perhaps this has something to do with the very ways that we are first taught to professionally barter in those terms. In this chapter, Smith grapples with how the ghettoization of theory has transformed it into what is marketed as an attractive but ultimately unnecessary appendage to scholarship, which remains the model that is still embraced by many graduate programs in religious studies today.