Reflections on the 2025-2026 season for the ISM's Religion, Ecology and Expressive Culture Initiative

The ISM’s unique Religion, Ecology and Expressive Culture (REEC) Initiative continued to thrive in its third year of programming. The initiative seeks to support and amplify the work of scholars, artists, and practitioners who are working in diverse media and genres at the intersections of three fields: religion, the environment, and the arts, all broadly construed. The initiative funds projects that speak to one or more of the following broad themes: Extraction and Disposal in Expressive Culture; Ritual Natures: Expressive Culture and the Natural Forms of Trees, Water, and Rocks; and Sacred Cosmologies, Environmental Change, and Expressive Culture. In the 2025-26 academic year, the REEC initiative built on previous successes, receiving a record number of applications from which five outstanding projects were selected for funding. These brought together a vibrant set of scholars, musicians, artists and scientists who work across different media and genres at the intersections of religion, ecology, and the arts.

The first event of the year, “Homegrown Dialogues: Womanist Perspectives on Spirit, Sound, and Sustainability” was a day-long performance-cum-dialogue featuring live music by Andromeda Turre and a wider jazz ensemble alongside a symposium convened by Dr. Mark Lomanno. Four parts of Turre’s 2024 album From the Earth (viz. Earth, Sky, Sea, and Ice) were each paired with a panel discussion that brought together scholars, community members, activists and musicians in conversation. These discussions foregrounded connections between African American and Indigenous cultural traditions, community stewardship by women, ecological sustainability and the place of music or expressive culture more broadly therein.

The second event, “Sacred Africana, Aquatic: Exploring Abundance and Scarcity Through Ritual in Burkina Faso, Cuba, and Haiti,” was a webinar convened by Dr. Meredith Coleman-Tobias. The webinar featured presentations by Dr. Maya J. Berry, Dr. Meredith Coleman-Tobias, Christina Taïna Désert. Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Harding served as a discussant to these papers that explored the water-based epistemologies of three Africana communities, and what makes water such a contested yet indispensable feature of Africana religious life.

The third event, “Water Cosmology, Water Crisis, Water Power: Hydrometaphysics beyond Metaphor,” convened by Sally Hansen, continued with theme of water, and brought together scholars across literary studies and the social sciences, activists, artists, curators, and spiritual practitioners diversely committed to the vitality of water and waterspaces towards collective healing.

The fourth event, “Laboratory for Other Worlds: Sacred Cosmologies, Environmental Change, and Expressive Culture,” was an art exhibition featuring works by Patte Loper and Erin Genia. This exhibition emerged from a collaboration between Patte Loper, and earth scientist, Dr. Andrew Kemp whose research seeks to understand rates and changes of sea-level rise through the analysis of single-celled foraminifera and other deposits in coastal marshlands. At the Institute of Sacred Music, the project asks: what if salt marshes and their microscopic biome, the site of Kemp’s research on paleolithic sea level rise, were considered sacred? The event also featured a lecture-demonstration musical performance by the cellist William Teixeira “New Sound Ecologies: Artistic Research and Musical Imagination after the Brazilian Pantanal”, which integrated field recordings from the Pantanal along with works for the cello.

The fifth and final event was a two-day symposium convened by Dr. Emily Pierini, Dr. Giovanna Capponi and Dr. Giovanna Parmigiani. Entitled “Healing with More-than-Humans: Environment, Historicities, and Sacred Materialities,” the symposium built on previous events organized by the HEAL Network for the Ethnography of Healing, and combined academic research on more-than-human engagements and spirituality with experiential, body-centered, learning. The event accordingly brought together paper presentations with dance, art and storytelling workshops, as well as performances centered around the relationship with more-than-humans held by anthropologists and anthropologist-practitioners engaging with themes and questions of healing, spirituality, and the environment.