Annual conference of the Dutch Association for the Study of Religion: Religion and the Production of Difference

Call for Papers

Date: 30 October – 1 November 2019

Venue: Groningen, Netherlands

Deadline: June 1, 2019

Julia Martínez Ariño is convening a panel on “Public policies and the production of religious difference”. This panel will explore how religious difference is produced, reproduced, challenged and/or ignored by public policies as well as how, inversely, notions of religious difference inform policymaking. The panel welcomes papers examining the production of religious difference, and religious-secular and religious-spiritual distinctions by public policies in fields such as urban planning and public space, education, security, immigrant integration, etc.

Some of the questions that the panel will address are the following:

• What are the social imaginaries and policy ideas underlying public policies in relation to religion and what are the resulting categories of difference?
• How do different actors, religious or not, receive and react to those categories and processes of differentiation?
• What are the (differential) implications of these processes and categories for different religious and non-religious groups and individuals?

We are interested in covering a wide range of geographical locations, theoretical perspectives and empirical approaches.

For more information, please visit the conference website.