Forschungsprojekte

While “religion” has ceased to be the primary reference point in Europe’s secular societies among the dominant population, religious organizations and affiliations are often playing a key role among migration-experienced families who settled in European countries after World War II. It is especially in societal contexts marked by migration (labour migration, decolonization, and flight), that religious infrastructures and membership appear as a point of reference (of shifting importance, over time), and also as a marker of difference - for members and representatives of both the dominant society, and of differing religious and ethnic minorities. It is in such contexts of heightened cultural diversity (alike in present-day Europe), that “religion” takes a role in the production of collective subjectivities and questions of space and belonging in diasporic settings. Here, “religion” is only one of many categories in complex webs of group affiliations at deploying its shifting meanings and power in relations with other dynamic categories and membership configurations, such as ethnicity, the nation, and culture. These three categories build the analytic lens through which six case studies tackle(d) the question of how “religion” is continuously reproduced in secular societies in social and institutional arenas of migration experience and diasporic contexts:

1. Muslims in Europe: Religion as a category of differentiation and powerful reference in developmental processes of new Muslim subjectivities
2. Muslims in Portugal: Religion as a category of classification and emancipatory identity politics in postcolonial settings
3. Young Muslims in Portugal: Religion as a marker of difference in groupings of similar class, ethnic backgrounds and daily life culture
4. Muslims in Lusophone Spaces: Religion as a pan-ethnic category in (post-)colonial contexts
5. Portuguese Emigrants in diverse diasporic settings: The reproduction and decline of “religion” in social and institutional arenas
6. Ethnoheterogenesis: The reproduction and shifting role(s) of religion in processes of (de-)ethnization