Empty Voices

This brief article details some reflections of mine after having taught as a graduate student on an undergraduate Religious Studies module for the last four years. The views here are my own and do not reflect the institution where I taught. Between October 2018 and July 2019, I had the opportunity to teach full-time on an undergraduate Religious Studies module at a university in the North West of England. It was called: “The Study of Religion: An Introduction” and was delivered to first-year Theology and Religious Studies students. For three years before that, I had given occasional lectures and tutored during weekly seminars for the same Religious Studies module and another titled “Global Perspectives in Christianity”. The responsibilities that I had during my teaching posts included weekly lectures, seminars, and tutorials, grading assignments, delivering study-skills sessions, and administration. Moreover, I was given the chance to adapt the Study of Religion module slightly in

In May 2016, Jay L. Garfield and Bryan W. Van Norden wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times which challenged the exclusion of non-western voices in Anglophone philosophy departments ( https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/opinion/if-philosophy-wont-diversify-lets-call-it-what-it-really-is.html ). They suggested that such practices of exclusion rested upon institutional racism which had its foundation in western colonialism and normativity. The exclusion of, say, Buddhist philosophical voices from departments of philosophy were/are always value judgement calls – calls which suggested that Buddhist thinkers were not engaged in activity that was completely rational and/or that the methods used by Buddhist thinkers were/are not completely rational (Garfield, 2017, xviii). I do not wish to engage in a systematic examination of study of religion departmental biases here; however, I do believe it is justified to suggest that similar institutional racism exists within our departments