Diving Deeper Into Racial Justice Work:
Recognizing & Facing Reactionary Backlash

with Brenna Artinger and Ann Gleig

Wednesday, 16 February 2022, 7PM-8:30PM US ET
Via Zoom. Free and open to all.

Recent years have seen an increasing embrace of racial justice work in American Buddhism, which is often articulated through the framework of engaged Buddhism with its emphasis on collective liberation. While many white Buddhists have committed to a "dharma of justice, equity, inclusion and freedom," others have claimed such work is irrelevant or even in opposition to the dharma. Ann and Brenna will talk about their collaborative research on the reactionary white backlash to racial justice work focusing particularly on the digital landscape. They will also discuss how the current reactionary backlash connects to other hierarchical and exclusory forms of Buddhism. 

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ABOUT BRENNA ARTINGER
Brenna Artinger is an independent scholar with an MPhil in Buddhist Studies from the University of Oxford. Their work focuses on exclusion and extremism with current emphasis on the intersection of Buddhism and Queer Theory in Pāli Vinaya texts.

ABOUT ANN GLEIG
Ann Gleig is an associate professor of Religion and Cultural Studies at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity (Yale University Press, 2019) and is currently working on a cowritten book on sexual violation in American Buddhism with Amy Langenberg.