Episode 6: Contagion, Religion, and Cities

Episode 6 of the podcast features a roundtable discussion at the American Academy of Religion’s Annual Conference. In the context of the novel coronavirus, COVID 19 pandemic, this roundtable explores questions regarding how religious actors have understood and responded to infectious diseases and pandemics and how cities have been imagined as contagious and the racial and gendered norms informing those imaginations. Dr. Jennifer Hughes’ work explores the 1576–1581 epidemic of hemorrhagic fever in central Mexico to probe the ambivalent origins of Christianity in the Americas as the _ecclesia ex mortuis_, the church of the dead. Dr. Wende Marshall draws on critical medical anthropology (on class and race inequality in science and medicine) and on political anthropology (on decolonization and social movements) in her academic and community and labor organizing work. Dr. Katherine Marshall’s work engages religious responses to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and draws lessons from it for responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Amanda Furiasse’s work is on religion and public health with a focus on the effects of quarantining on Ethiopian communities in Israel.