International Partnership Meeting

Prof Sarojini Nadar, Dr Lee Scharnick-Udemans and Dr Megan Robertson spent a week with our partners from the Centre for Religion and Public Life (CRPL) at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.

Dr Lee Scharnick-Udemans was invited to participate in the CRPL’s Research Symposium where she presented a paper titled, “Politics, Privilege and Pluralism: Exploring the Contestation of Religious Diversity in Contemporary South Africa” Prof Sarojini Nadar was also invited to deliver a public lecture titled “Sanctifying Sex: Exploring Indecent Sexual Imagery in Pentecostal Liturgical Practices”.

This partnership network meeting was also an opportunity to engage with the CRPL on future collaborative research and teaching endeavours. One of the outcomes of this meeting was a commitment to explore opportunities for co-supervision and exchange for postgraduate students and emerging scholars.  As part of exploring this commitment, the team from the Desmond Tutu Centre participated in a postgraduate masterclass where we had the opportunity to introduce postgraduate and postdoctoral students of the CRPL to the work of the Desmond Tutu Centre. This was done through a presentation by the Centre and a lively discussion around articles published by Prof Nadar (Sacred Sex, Sacred Text: Queering Religious Sexual Scripts in Transforming African Societies”, forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible, edited by Susanne Scholtz) and Dr Scharnick-Udemans (“TV is the Devil, the Devil is on TV: Wild Religion and Wild Media in South Africa”, Journal for the Study of Religion vol.31 no. 2 (2018)). In the second half of the programme students from the CRPL, Sofia Rehman, Tamanda Walker and Kwame Ahaligah, as well as Dr Megan Robertson presented their work.