final project instructions

Create a final project in which you consider the relationship between the Black Lives Matter movement and religion. You are welcome to develop a project on any specific topic of your choosing, but it must be address a theme or issue related to Black Lives Matter and religion. Sample topics can be found below.

Your project can take any creative form of your choosing, such as an extended essay (8 pages), a recorded podcast episode (perhaps created in collaboration with a classmate), a curated collection of art pieces or protest posters, a Zine, an edited video or film, etc.

Keep in mind that your topics must be chosen in consultation with me. Please be sure to set up a time to meet with me over office hours to discuss whether your project idea is tenable. Feel free to schedule an appointment any time during the semester. I will also hold open office hours during our class session on November 18 for the purpose of discussing final project topics.

The final project is a stand-in for a final exam and will be due on our scheduled exam date of December 14 at 5pm.

Sample Paper Topics

• Reflect on Anthony Pinn’s article entitled “Black Bodies in Pain and Ecstacy: Terror, Subjectivity and the Nature of Black Religion” and the materials you have engaged up to this point on the Black Lives Matter movement. Create a project in which you make a case for how the Black Lives Matter movement constitutes what Pinn refers to as the “quest for complex subjectivity” that defines black religion.
• Create a project that explores how the Black Lives Matter movement poses both a challenge to a particular religious tradition and how it dovetails or complements the aims or beliefs of a religious tradition. Here, you can think with King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Cone’s Black Theology of Liberation, Floyd-Thomas’s Womanist Theology, and other materials from the syllabus. You can also incorporate your own reasoned knowledge and research of a particular religious tradition.
• What are the similarities and differences between Womanist Theology and the black feminist approaches espoused by many Black Lives Matter activists? How might the work of Ella Baker and Angela Davis dovetail with the work of Womanist theology and its emphasis on community survival? In what ways do these modes of thought differ?
• How is are the religious themes of “apocalypse” and “eschatology” emerging in the Black Lives Matter movement? Define these themes and explore specific ways in which they emerge through BLM demands, protest posters, music, etc.