This month’s Discourse! is presented by Sidney Castillo, with his guests Maria Nita, Juan Manuel Rubio Arevalo, and Stefanie Butendieck. Discussion focuses on the effects of COVID restrictions on different religious communities, including festivals, activism, funeral practices, and the Chilean “Mapuche” community. The conversation goes on to discuss the role of scholars in policy-making, particularly in a South American context. Finally, the panelists discuss Amy Kaufman’s and Paul Sturtevant’s 2020 book The Devil’s Historians: How modern extremists abuse the medieval past, which explores how religion is portrayed and constructed in contemporary medievalism.

Resources for this episode include:

Festival Research and Covid-19 from the recent virtual event sponsored by The Open University: http://fass.open.ac.uk/festivals-research

For a broad sense of the issues with the Mapuche community, you can view the online news article: https://chiletoday.cl/site/the-effects-of-covid-19-on-the-mapuche-community/