St. Patrick’s Day is a national holiday on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, yet its significance differs from Ireland’s observance. This paper explores the historical and contemporary significance of a holiday commemorating an unsuccessful 1768 slave uprising strategically planned while Anglo-Irish settlers were preoccupied with their own festivities. Declared a public holiday in 1985, the 10-day celebration became a major cultural event, bringing tourism and, importantly, serving as a homecoming for diasporic Montserratians. However, the volcanic crises (1995-2010) rendered two-thirds of the island uninhabitable, displacing thousands and reshaping the event. More recently, COVID-19 further disrupted the celebrations and reunions. While recent years seem more familiar to Montserratians, St. Patrick’s Day, its meaning and celebration, remains a layered symbol of oppression, loss, resilience, and joy.

This panel explores how imaginative practices are emancipatory practices that emerge in unexpected circumstances. Imagination serves as a tool for liberation in which people and communities re-envision the world not as it is but as they hope it will be, making these spaces ones of hope and resistance. These transformations necessitate rupture with the past for re-birth to occur. This is the case in the social death experienced by incarcerated persons and monastics in which the concept of Klostertod helps us to understand how spiritual resurrection occurs in places of isolation or confinement. Other contexts demand the reclamation of memory for the purpose of revitalization, as in the St. Patrick’s Day celebrations on the Caribbean island Montserrat that simultaneously commemorate violence and loss even as it they lead to reunion and homecoming. Our aim is to highlight through these instances how oppression is transformed into celebration.

This thesis explores the interconnectedness of classism and racism and how these dual systems of oppression impact the Black student community at Bates College. Racism has long been recognized as a fundamental structure of inequality; this study emphasizes how class stratification deepens these inequities within the black community itself. Through analyzing historical contexts, research studies, and qualitative interviews, my thesis investigates how Black individuals navigate relationships with each other through their definitions of what it means to be Black. I explore how their unique experiences lead to varying self-expression, causing a divide within the Black community at Bates. Drawing on intersectional theory, my research examines how the convergence of economic and racial barriers compounds discrimination, affecting the inner workings of the Black student community. I draw attention to and discuss the unique social hierarchy where class position within the Black population determines varying degrees of marginalization.

This paper explores the related forms of “social death” experienced by incarcerated people and monastics. The term “social death” was coined in 1985 by sociologist Orlando Patterson in his text Slavery and Social Death, to describe the condition of people not accepted as fully human by wider society, specifically in the context of slavery. The term has since been used to describe the treatment of people in prison, and here I will extend its use to describe the parallel medieval German legal and spiritual concept of Klostertod (monastic death).This paper will conclude by drawing on practical theology’s musings on the importance of imagination and embodied practices, and especially the way monastic spirituality is uniquely positioned to envision an abolitionist world “on earth as it is in heaven.”