Religion as Revolution Posters

While working as a Teaching Assistant in McGill’s Faculty of Religious Studies, I was often in a liminal position: neither full-fledged graduate student, nor truly considered to be staff. But when it came to the graduate students’ annual conference, I managed to work my way into the organising committee without too much trouble. Sponsored by the Centre for Research on Religion, but organised by the grad students, the 2010 theme was too awesome to pass up: Religion as Revolution.

I initially wanted to submit a paper for the conference. I am interested in looking at how religions can contribute to understanding, and perhaps dealing with the revolutionary change that world societies will undergo due to global climate change. Unfortunately, working two other jobs made the research impossible. I regret that. Especially, since, I think the conference ended up focusing more on epistemological and theoretical ideas, rather than examining social change as revolution.

In any case, I did contribute to the conference by designing some outreach materials. In Fall 2009 I helped whip the Call For Papers into a nicely formatted, hopefully eye-catching, single page document. It went on to adorn many a grad lounge bulletin board across the North-East and Canada.

Later on that winter, I designed some posters to promote the conference within Montreal, and at other key schools such as Université d’Ottawa and University of Toronto. The first posters I put together were inspired by one of keynote speakers: Johannes Wolfart. At the selection meeting, I had a vision of a giant, snarling wolf paired up with a bleeding, flaming heart. Wolfart was supposed to be a crowd pleaser, and I thought we could market him to get people to the conference.

Later, we confirmed a second keynote speaker: Travis Kroeker. His name was, unfortunately, not as acutely evocative. But with the help of the ancient Sumerian alphabet, I managed to turn his name into a bestial, twinned diptych.

In any case, these posters were deemed a bit too obtuse. So Julian Menezes and I buckeled down for a near interminable round of revisions, aiming to find the perfect image to adorn our posters. The problem was trying to accomodate the wide diversity of ideas that could fit within ‘revolution’, while also avoiding favouritism toward any one of the world’s religious traditions. In other words, we didn’t want to resort to projecting a merely Marxist image of revolution, when we were hoping to attract students interested in the Islamic Revolution, Wittgentstein, the Reformation, and more.

Download the Call For Proposals