Creating an Image Bank for Teaching World Religion: Challenging and Reifying Structures of Knowledge

Abstract

Creating an indexed set of slides for teaching the academic study of religion reveals how existing structures of power/ knowledge shape the frameworks from which new knowledge emerges, and how that knowledge may affect those structures. Although cultural, political and personal history impinge upon every aspect of the project, the data and the challenge of organizing them reveal meaningful world-experiences that lie outside the capacity of our knowledge structures, tending to transform or destabilize them.