From the rise of white Christian nationalism in the United States to anti-immigration rhetoric against 'Muslim refugees' in Europe, the imbrication of race, racism and religion extends across geographic locations, social settings, and political contexts. As xenophobia and discrimination surge around the globe, religion and race are often conflated in everyday violence, yet their relationship is undertheorised in scholarly research. While scholars of religion and critical race theorists are rarely in conversation about these intersections, recent works have pushed for more analysis of the race-religion interplay. Inspired by pioneering scholarship such as Kathryn Gin Lum, Nasar Meer, and Esra Özyürek, this Seminar Series Religion, Race and Racism - Transnational Conversations, brings emerging and senior scholars into conversation. In doing so, we reject a single-issue approach to the study of key social and political events, and push for an intersectional approach to the study of race, racism and religion. Through ethnographic, sociological and historical case studies, the series engages with the following questions:
What informs the relationship between religion and racial inequality in different contexts?
How are specific forms of discrimination, such as Islamophobia, understood in both racial and religious terms?
How are historical configurations of race and religion reconfigured through present day technologies such as: DNA and ancestry tests, immigration policies and right-wing politics?
By facilitating conversations between leading scholars examining the relationship between race and religion, this series offers divergent perspectives, opposing views, and creative theorisations to offer fresh analytical tools for an urgent area of study.
Convenors:
Katie Gaddini, Dunya Habash and Lea Taragin-Zeller
Registration details:
https://www.woolf.cam.ac.uk/research/conferences/seminar-series-religion-race-and-racism-transnational-conversations