Leslie Dorrough Smith is Chair of the School of Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies at Avila University (Kansas City, MO). Her research focuses broadly on how evangelicalism and Christian conservatism impact American cultural attitudes on sex, gender, and race. She is the author of two books (both with Oxford University Press) on these topics: Compromising Positions: Political Sex Scandals and American Christianity (2019) and Righteous Rhetoric: Sex, Speech, and the Politics of Concerned Women for America (2014). She is also editor of Hijacked: A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion (with Steffen Führding and Adrian Hermann, Equinox, 2020) and Constructing Data in Religious Studies: Examining the Architecture of the Academy (Equinox, 2019). Her most recent book with co-author Steven Ramey is Religions of the World: Questions, Challenges, and New Directions (Equinox, 2024).
In this October 2020 episode of Discourse!, Andie Alexander, Hina Muneeruddin, and Leslie Dorrough Smith explore ideas of infantile citizens, political debates as spectacle, rhetoric as bumper bowling, fist-fighting viruses, and fake news in the discourses surrounding the US Presidential election.
Identity or Identification? In this second podcast for Identities? Week, the Culture on the Edge group address the issue of religious identity. Is our identity – cultural, religious or other – something which causes us to act, or something which we choose to mobilise in certain circumstances? And what part do scholars have in reifying these discourses?
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