Institute for Signifying Scriptures Begins a New Phase

Institute for Signifying Scriptures

The Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS) started a new phase as an independent organization in 2014, continuing its devotion to reach a broader public and cultivating and advancing an even more expansive and transgressive agenda. Its inaugural annual meeting will be held from 18 to 20 February 2016 at the Kennedy School, Portland, Oregon. Details about the meeting available here: http://signifyingscriptures.org/signify/gumbe/annual-meeting-announcement-2016/ 

Founded in February 2004 at the Claremont Graduate University, with support from the Ford Foundation, the ISS was named to underscore the fraught shorthand for cultural, social, political and power dynamics, especially having to do with discourse and language. It sought to advance critical transdisciplinary and collaborative research in the humanities and related academic disciplines. Over the next decade the ISS initiated and sponsored a number of research projects including: the three-year Ethnologies of Scriptural Readings in the U.S.; the production in 2009 of the award-winning documentary film “Finding God in the City of Angels,” and the Scripturalizing the Human project. An academic-programmatic outgrowth of the agenda of ISS was the conceptualization and establishment in 2009 of the unique Critical Comparative Scriptures (CCS) program at the Claremont Graduate University. In 2014 the ISS became an independent organization to further its mission. Details about its history and mission available here:  http://signifyingscriptures.org/signify/brief-history/# and http://signifyingscriptures.org/signify/mission-statement-and-making-the-case-for-iss/