Multi-Religious Encounters in Urban Settings

Project Information

MEUS

Grant agreement ID: 802226

DOI

10.3030/802226

Project closed

EC signature date 15 January 2019

Start date 1 October 2019

End date 30 April 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 498 666,00

EU contribution

€ 1 498 666,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - MEUS (Multi-Religious Encounters in Urban Settings)

Reporting period: 2023-05-01 to 2024-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

This comparative ethnographic project asks the following core question: how do people of different faiths coexist in cities? Questions of coexistence take on urgency in a time of increasing religiously- inflected flashpoints across the globe. How can we think about religious coexistence beyond prevailing frameworks of tolerance or conflict? MEUS will explore multi-religious encounters in non- secular urban contexts, ie. areas where there is a state religion or where religion has salience in the public sphere. Research will be organised into three complementary and contrasting sub-projects in South Asia (Karachi), East Africa (Nairobi), and Southern Europe (Palermo). The sites are similar, having served historically as encounter sites for major religions, but differ in their vantage points on religious pluralism.

The project has two objectives: 1) to examine what modes of religious co-habitation emerge in aspiring urban settings; and 2) to develop a cross-regional comparative framework about religious pluralism that de-centers secular-liberal ideas of tolerance and opens space for alternate modes of coexistence. MEUS will ask: How do people of different religious faiths coexist in cities? What tensions and contestations does such coexistence articulate or give rise to? Do aspirations for socioeconomic mobility engender encounters with religious ‘others’ and, if so, how do people make sense of this contact?

MEUS is novel in its ethnographic and comparative frame. Its interventions within debates on pluralism will challenge the monistic tendencies of studies of religion (eg. the anthropology of Islam) and counter the hegemony of secularism in ideas on coexistence. MEUS is cognizant that current work on coexistence, outside of liberal contexts, is largely regional and interpreted as exceptions to the norm. Instead, MEUS pushes against the limits of regional comparisons to develop a cross- regional, historically sensitive understanding of coexistence with the aim of provincializing secularism.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The first 2.5 years of MEUS have focused on establishing academic and ground networks, both at the sites and in academic spaces, and conducting fieldwork. This work has entailed desk-based research, discussion, and writing aimed at refining the theoretical underpinnings of the project, and conducting fieldwork in the three sites, Karachi, Palermo, and Nairobi. Through fieldwork and primary research, a new body of data has been collected that will serve as the basis for MEUS analytical work and theorisation. Research teams were recruited and trained for each of the three sites, and fieldwork at two sites (Pakistan and Italy) is nearing completion. With fieldwork at the third site due to be completed in the coming year, we will move into the next phase of the project, focused towards analysis of the findings and dissemination events, both at international conferences and workshops as well as at the field sites. The PI and RFs have been presenting their ongoing findings both at their field sites and internationally, and important publications already arising from the project include a Special Issue in a journal, as well as peer-reviewed articles by the PI and RFs.

Undoubtedly, this first phase of the project has been affected by the coronavirus pandemic, including both the UK government’s decision to add two of the field sites to the ‘Red List’, thus precluding even the possibility of travel. We have thus faced some delays in our timeline for fieldwork but have, largely, followed our larger plan.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Our original premise, outlined in the project proposal, was already thinking beyond the state of the art as it aimed to establish an alternate model on coexistence through a focus on non-liberal contexts. Such theoretical investigation promises to ‘deprovincialize’ current theorisations on coexistence that are largely based on Euro-American liberal political theory and assumes that for people to live together, religion needs to recede from the public sphere. Our current fieldwork findings challenge this ideal and also support our related theoretical hypothesis that coexistence and conflict are not necessarily in opposition to one another. In this sense, they are important building blocks for our larger pursuit for new ground-breaking theorisations of coexistence.