Multi-religious encounters in precarious urban settings 2017 - ongoing

Overview

While most research on religious pluralism has been conducted within the framework of secular-liberal democratic states, this collaborative and comparative project, which is in development, will explore multi-religious encounters in three sites not typically seen as possessing secular-liberal civil societies: Kenya, Pakistan, and southern Italy. The sites are similar in having served historically as places of encounter for major religions, but also different in relation to their contemporary socio-political configurations. With each offering a different vantage point on religious pluralism, the wider project aims to contribute to theorising about religious co-existence that moves beyond normative ideas of tolerance, which tend to dominate academic thinking on pluralism. My research within the larger project will focus on post-colonial Christian Kenya, a multi-ethnic, -racial, and -religious society, which has been implicated in global ‘War of Terror’ and where social tensions are increasingly made sense of through religious idioms.

Topics

CitiesReligion