David Olali

With interests around re-(de)-centering/abscesses of scripturality, David Olali's intellectual investment engages productions, politics, and use of "scripture" --and scriptural categories -- in quotidian psycho-cultural economies. For him, domains of rhetorics expand through use to assume new status that are, out of convenience, re/mislabeled (repurposed) as "scriptures." He invites us to think about what is known as the ontology of comparativity as cognitive-analytical investigations of what it means to be human, the domain of masters around meaning-making.

In terms of his broader scholarly interests, he re-centers the human within psychological, economic, social, cultural, and political landscapes [of being and becoming]. He offers--and invites opportunities that--challenge us into creative, critical, and reflexive thinking around the histories of our meanings, including the conflicting dynamics of human meaninglessness, and meaningfulness, whether of affective religions, or of reconstructed irreligiosities by locating possible intersections that exist between religious and non-religious scriptures and their tropes of violence, as domains for negotiations in/of, or contests between and/or against human bodies, as sites for the re- and/or de-embodiments of categories that ultimately  inflect/reflect/deflect psychosocial and political authorials.

He is the Founding Director of Comparative Heritage Project, a transdisciplinary research project that theorizes heritage formation, heritage promulgation, and heritage proliferation as core mandates in human existence (Please visit CHP at https://comparativeheritage.org). 

Additionally, his "Comparative Complex Theory" -- or CCT for short -- is a theory about decolonial construal of geopolitics and the role and place of colonized and subjugated peoples in the modern, globalizing world.