About
Andrea R. Jain, Ph.D. is professor of religious studies at Indiana University, Indianapolis, editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and author of Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture (Oxford, 2014) and Peace Love Yoga: The Politics of Global Spirituality (Oxford, 2020). She received her doctorate degree in religious studies from Rice University in 2010.
She writes and speaks about capitalism, religion, sex, and society in our contemporary world and from a leftist, feminist perspective. She also advocates for neurodiversity everywhere she goes. Her politics inform her work.
Jain’s current work, including the book project and documentary film Predation, centers questions about the normalized violence against animals under late capitalism and its expressions in pop culture and co-constitutions with other forms of violence. At Indiana University, Indianapolis she serves as an initiating member of the Sustaining Earth Consortium, which pursues research on climate change, sustainability, and environmental equity as critical factors driving what a healthy global future looks like. She is a member of the Finite Futures team, which aims to design and implement a new model of generative, public-facing, multidisciplinary engagement at the nexus of religion, technology, and justice in the Anthropocene. Her contributions focus on the capitalocene, that is, the uniquely disastrous changes that are a consequence of the social values and practices of late capitalism. She also works with the Religion & Sexual Abuse Project where her contributions analyze the ways harm toward other-than-human animals and sexual and gendered violence as well as ableism co-constitute one another in a social context that commodifies animals and humans, valuing them only in terms of their productive labor.