Rethinking Culture, Race, Religion, Class, Sexuality and Gender in the Context of Globalisation
Yolande Jansen
dr. R. Celikates
dr. H.Y.M. Jansen
dr. M. Kanie
prof.dr.ir. B.J. de Kloet
dr. M.M. Leezenberg
N. Martin MA
L.E. Mazurski MA
dr. N. Roei
dr. K.V.Q. Vintges
Recently, on a global scale, cultural-political questions connected to
globalisation and migration have increasingly been turned away from being
treated in terms of cultural interaction and diversity and/or political and
political-economic relations and inequalities. Issues at stake tend to be framed
in terms of shifting boundaries between secular and liberal values, or even
civilisations, and more orthodox religious ones. Differences then also tend to
be geographically located in terms of the relation between liberal and secular
Euro-America and a religious outside, in particular with regard to the Global
South. Migrants are frequently seen to represent postcolonial, religious
Otherness within Europe. This research group reflects on the effects of this
increasingly dominant framework for understanding multicultural questions and
the politics of difference. It rethinks the intersections between race,
religion, sexuality, class and gender in the context of neoliberal cultural
globalisation. It aspires to answer the question of how to conceive of
non-reifying multicultural politics, and how to reclaim multiculturalism as a
project of hope in the context of neoliberal cultural globalisation.
Members of the research group explore the various ways in which longstanding
contacts between the Middle East, Europe and Asia have influenced and
transformed cultural, religious and political discourses and practices in
European, Asian and Middle Eastern contexts, while especially focusing on the
interpretations of these interactions in contemporary public reflection. Another
field is to reflect on the position of ethno-religious minorities in Europe, and
on the position of Jews and Muslims in particular, as two distinct minorities
with highly complex, interconnected and variable religious, political, cultural
and ethnic dimensions, which tend to become the objects of social and cultural
exclusion and discrimination. We also study the ways in which the position of
women has become highly politicised in the socalled ‘clash of civilisations’,
and in particular we study the ways in which women from various backgrounds
themselves deal with globalisation, especially in the context of recent
developments in the Middle East. More generally, we explore how in recent
decades both feminine and masculine gender identities have changed, and how
discourses of homo- and heterosexuality, and of normality and perversion, have
been instrumentalised to legitimate or contest national and religious identities
in an increasingly global arena. The research group’s work forms part of a
broad, fundamental, international rethinking of the relationship between
religion, secularity, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class and race in the
context of globalisation.
Volume ‘Islam in Europe: Beyond the Secular-Religious Divide’, eds Yolande
Jansen and Michiel Leezenberg. Book project ‘Provincializing Philosophy’.
VIDI-application and application recently submitted to the NWO programme
‘Religion in Modern society’.
Film documentary on Moroccan Feminism (Andreu / Vintges) (2013)
Book project ‘Re-writing The Second Sex from a global perspective (Vintges,
2014) PhD dissertation – (supervision P.Peters/ F.Sadiqi)/ co-supervisor:
K.Vintges (2013) International partners: Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood, England;
Sindre Bangstad and Jonas Jakobsen (Norway); Volker Heins and Riem Spielhaus
(Germany); Esther Benbassa (France); Anne Norton, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Gil
Anidjar (U.S.) Moha Ennaji (Fes), Fatima Sadiqi (Fes)
We organise bimonthly reading sessions of participants’ papers and articles.
Time span: five years Edited volume: to be submitted 2013. Book length study: To
be submitted 2014.
Journal articles. VIDI-application 2013 and perhaps 2014.
Application submitted to NWO ‘Religion in modern society’ programme: 2013-2018.
The intersected position of ethno-religious and sexual and gender minorities in a global context is a topic of concern on local, national and global levels. This research group analyses the intersected position of postcolonial, migrant, sexual, gender and Jewish and Muslim minorities which have been subject to complex trajectories of racialisation, culturalisation and orientalisation in various regions of the world, and which are at risk of severe forms of discrimination, being increasingly framed in terms of a secular-religious opposition. The researchers involved in this research group disseminate the results of their work outside the academy, in public debate, and for public organisations.