Convenor
Wai-chi Chee
University of Hong Kong
Abstract
In the current ever expanding global networks of exchange, an unprecedented movement and connection of people, goods, capital, information, and ideas has blurred geographic confines, political borders and sociocultural boundaries. In this context, the intense and complex interactions between different religious communities and between religious and nonreligious groups lead to the constitution and reconstitution of new forms of religious space, both physical and symbolic. Different religious spaces are contained or allowed for in uneven ways: some spaces are encouraged and accepted while others are discouraged and rejected. The making of religious spaces is also intertwined with other spaces such as ethnic space and gender space. In the process, different religious communities find themselves challenged by the dynamics of religious space-making that constantly require creative adaptation.
The constitution of religious spaces entails the interplay between different opposing and yet interlocking forces, be it state vs civil space, or physical vs virtual space, or localism vs globalism, or spiritual vs secular, or tradition vs modernity. To tease out the complexities of religious space-making, this panel brings into discussion the ways religion spaces are negotiated, contested, created, and recreated in the public realm, and how this transforms religion.
This panel invites papers that address the following questions:
– What are the new forms of religious space and how are they created? How are claims for religious spaces negotiated, accepted or refuted? What are the roles of different actors?
– How is religious pluralism manifested, articulated and represented when different religious and non-religious groups compete for spaces? What is the interplay between religious practices and perceptions and religious space-making?
– How are religious spaces sites of agreements and disputes? What are the challenges and possibilities these spacesoffer for religion?
– How do new forms of religious space contribute to religious homogeneity and plurality? How do they transform regulatory regime and open space?
– What are the dynamics between religious identity and other facets of identity such as gender, ethnic, and national identities?
– How are religious communities networked locally and globally? How do they identify with and distinguish themselves from each other?
– What are the politics of religious space-making in the context of migration?
By addressing the complexities of religious space-making, this panel seeks to contribute to the theoretical understanding of contemporary religious situation, especially when it pertains to religious pluralism and the relations between different religious groups as well as between religious and non-religious communities