Whitney Bauman is an associate professor of religious studies at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. He is also co-founder and co-director of Counterpoint: Navigating Knowledge, a non-profit based in Berlin, Germany, that holds public discussions over social and ecological issues related to globalization and climate change. His areas of research interest fall under the theme of “religion, science, and globalization.” He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a Humboldt Fellowship. His publications include Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic, co-authoring with Kevin O’Brien, Environmental Ethics and Uncertainty: Tackling Wicked Problems. He is currently working on a manuscript tentatively entitled, Developing a Critical Planetary Romanticism: CPR For the Earth.
Bauman’s 2022 Fulbright at Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, can be summarized by “Decolonizing Subjects for the Planetary Community.” He is teaching two doctoral seminars. The first, “Religion and Science in the Indonesian Context,” seeks to trouble the colonial roots of both “religion” and “science,” which don’t map on to knowledge-producing subjects in the Indonesian archipelago. There is no secular space, for instance, that divides religion and science; rather, pluralism entails a mode of religious-filled public discourse. The second seminar, “Religion, Nature, and Globalization in the Indonesian Archipelago,” collects case studies of religious/indigenous communities fighting against resource extraction and climate change. “Nature” is also not understood as something sublime, untouched by human experience, nor as the subject of control by Modern Western science and technology, but as an active agent: Indonesia is in the “ring of fire” and experiences earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and typhoons. It is also a very important site for the development of evolutionary theory, visited by Alexander von Humboldt and Ernst Haeckel, among others.
These courses feed into a two-day symposium with scholars from Indonesia, Vietnam, the European Union, and the United States, entitled: “Negotiating Pluralism for the Planetary Community: Humanities, Culture, and the Sciences in SE Asia.” This symposium is leading toward an ongoing project entitled “Decolonizing Subjects for the Planetary Community,” which will focus on decolonizing: the human, religion, and science through critical discourses that look at concepts such as gender, sex, sexuality, and race. Some of the papers from the doctoral seminar and the symposia will be published in a special issue of the journal, Studies in Interreligious Dialogue, focused on interreligious responses to climate change in southeast Asia, edited by Bauman.
