FRAMING TERROR: A Conversation on Masculinity, Religion, and Gun Violence

America is still reeling from last month’s Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando. The largest single-perpetrator mass shooting in the nation’s history has left politicians, pundits, and everyday people reaching for answers. Our struggle to understand Orlando has often relied on tired frames and rhetoric – simplistic narratives about religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and terror. But the event itself resists these frames and demands we rethink our assumptions and understanding of the different kinds of violence existing in contemporary America.

"Framing Terror" will tackle these questions by bringing together scholars working on gun violence, religious violence, and gender and sexuality. Sponsored by the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and NYU's Center for Religion and Media, this event will bring together scholarly and journalistic perspectives to reflect on the Pulse shooting itself, public responses to it, and the landscape going forward. 

PANELISTS: 

MEHAMMED MACK is an Assistant Professor of French Studies at Smith College. He works on issues related to immigration, gender and sexuality in France, and his first book, "Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture" will be released by Fordham University Press this fall.

PATRICK BLANCHFIELD is a freelance journalist and
academic. His work on guns and American culture has appeared in The New York Times, n + 1, The Trace, The New York Daily News, The Daily Beast, and elsewhere. This fall, he will be Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs Post-Doctoral Fellow at NYU's Center for Religion and Media.

SUZANNE SCHNEIDER is the Director of Operations of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. A social and cultural historian, her book manuscript, "The Schoolroom and the Sacred: Religious Education and Mass Politics in Mandate Palestine," explores the relationship between religious traditions and political activism in the modern era. Suzanne is currently working on a new book about religious violence and the social contract in the modern Middle East.

AJAY SINGH CHAUDHARY is the Executive & Founding Director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University’s Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Ajay is a comparative philosopher whose research focuses on comparative philosophy, political theory, Iranian and Islamic intellectual history, the Frankfurt School, modern Jewish thought, religion, social and critical theory, visual/media studies, and post-colonial studies.

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