Paris Workshop

Religious engagement has returned to central stage in social life, marking personal expression and political commitment in new ways. Religious and national identities intersect, influence, and impact each other as they are inflected by the politics of race and secularization. As globalizing processes have proliferated, people have moved increasingly across borders and boundaries, prompted by environmental, social, and political events, throwing into impacted social arenas contestations around the intersections of religious affiliation and expression, ethnoracial identification, national culture, and social expectation. Religious identities are connected in new ways to these local sites and global processes, to logics of territorialization and deterritorialization, to complicated and complicating attachments to new sites of habitation and not altogether departed histories, affiliations, and commitments.

These sharp shifts at the interface of religious, social, and political lives raise old issues anew as well as new questions about cohabiting across politicoreligious commitments, their cultural expression, and social management. These questions will be discussed in a two-day workshop by scholars and media experts associated with the Religion in Diasporic and Global Affairs research program of the University of California Humanities Research Institute and scholars, artists, journalists, and activists from France and across the world.