CURA Colloquium: Community Caregivers in Uganda
The Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs (CURA), an affiliated regional studies center of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, hosted a talk with Nicolette Manglos-Weber, Assistant Professor at the BU School of Theology, on November 1, 2019 as part of their 2019-2020 Colloquium on Religion and World Affairs.
Manglos-Weber gave a talk entitled “Community Caregivers in Uganda: Popular Religion and an Emerging Social Field.” In the talk, she discussed Christian and Muslim women leaders in Uganda who are working to address the broader care needs of their communities in both urban and rural settings.
Manglos-Weber described these community caregivers as players in an emerging social field focused on solving Uganda’s pervasive crisis of care, caused by the undermining of traditional care infrastructure and the failed interventions of foreign and domestic governance organizations. She argued that this ostensibly “secular” field is nonetheless enabled by religious modes of practice, and embedded in Ugandan popular religion and the religious social ecology.
CURA hosts a yearly interdisciplinary Colloquium on Religion and World Affairs, in cooperation with the BU School of Theology. The Colloquium meets bimonthly throughout the academic year to discuss working papers on the chosen theme, either written by CURA Fellows or invited scholars from outside BU. CURA Fellows are selected from across the BU community during a competitive application period every spring. The Colloquium sessions are open to the general public, but all attendees are expected to read the papers in advance. The sessions focus on providing feedback and suggestions to the authors. Authors do not make a formal presentation but are able to engage with the audience and answer questions after the papers are discussed.
The theme for the 2019-2020 colloquium is “Religion and Identity.” The working papers will explore the ways in which religion creates, shapes, and interacts with individual and social identities. We welcome work that explores specifically religious identity as race, gender, sexuality, and nationality.