Religion and Public Memory in Multicultural Societies
Research Collaboration funded by the Anneliese Maier Research Award, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Award winner: | Prof. Dr. Pamela Klassen, Department for the Study of Religion/Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Distinguished Visiting Professor for the Anthropology of Modern Religion at the University of Tübingen, Dept. for Historical and Cultural Anthropology |
Host: | Prof. Dr. Monique Scheer |
Term: | 2015-2020 |
Volume: | 250,000 Euro |
Project Description
This five-year collaborative project will bring together an international group of scholars and students with a particular interest in how the contested—and sometimes celebrated—categories of religion and multiculturalism shape, provoke, and complicate projects of public memory. These projects, such as museums, monuments, digital platforms, and truth and reconciliation commissions, tell stories of the past for many different reasons: critical reflection, celebration, education, healing and reconciliation. In countries with steady flows of immigration, audiences of great religious, ethnic, political, and generational diversity are called to remember a past that they may not claim as their own. This call to remember is an appeal mediated through genres of storytelling and memorialization—such as the testimony and confession or the artifact enclosed in a museum’s glass case—that make more sense in some religious or cultural contexts than others.
Working from a comparative perspective in terms of both region and discipline, the project will include scholars from across the humanities, including study of religion, anthropology, history, museum studies, and Aboriginal studies, who focus on North American and European contexts from the 19th-21st centuries.
A series of workshops and conferences will focus on such topics as:
- Museums and other sites of public memory as primary sites where people learn about religious diversity and multiculturalism as normative ideals
- The historical and continued significance of religion for “secular” narratives, rhetorics, and materializations of a nation’s past
- Comparative study of how the intersection of colonialism and Christian missions are narrated and displayed in sites of public memory
- The rise and significance of projects that seek to create collective memory from a ground-up approach, engaging lay people directly in working with collections, and in the development of narratives and exhibitions
- The ways that legally-sanctioned state violence, especially against groups marked as religious/ethnic minorities, is remembered or forgotten in projects of public memory
Events
God Beyond Theology –Islamic Studies within the Secular Academy A conversation with Prof. Amira Mittermaier (Dept for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto) and Prof. LejlaDemiri (Center for Islamic Theology, University of Tübingen) 20.01.2020, Universität Tübingen Infos Video |
Museums, Religion, and the Work of Reconciliation and Remembrance |
Venus in Transit. Prehistoric Art and Religion A conversation with Silvia Tomášková (UNC-Chapel Hill) and Nicholas Conard (University of Tübingen) January 28, 2019, University of Tübingen |
Reformation and Refugees. Alternative Histories November 14, 2017, University of Tübingen |
Sites of Memory: Religion, Multiculturalism and the Demands of the Past 15th - 17th October 2016, University of Toronto Information and Program |
Christmas in the Multicultural City: Public and Private Rituals between Culture, Religion and Consumption 10. - 11.12.2015, Universität Tübingen Information and Program |
Publications
Monique Scheer / Pamela E. Klassen (Hg.): Der Unterschied, den Weihnachten macht. Differenz und Zugehörigkeit in multikulturellen Gesellschaften. Tübingen: TVV, 2019.
Pamela E. Klassen and Monique Scheer (eds.): The Public Work of Christmas. Difference and Belonging in Multicultural Societies. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019.
Monique Scheer: The Difference That Christmas Makes: Thoughts on Christian Affordances in Multicultural Societies (with Pamela E. Klassen). In: Pamela E. Klassen and Monique Scheer (eds.): The Public Work of Christmas. Difference and Belonging in Multicultural Societies. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019, pp. 3-16.
Monique Scheer: Tense Holidays: Approaching Christmas through Conflict. In: Pamela E. Klassen and Monique Scheer (eds.): The Public Work of Christmas. Difference and Belonging in Multicultural Societies. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019, pp. 17-35.
Pamela E. Klassen: „Die erste ‚Weiße‘ Weihnacht“. Siedlungs-Multikulturalismus, Nisga’a Gastfreundschaft und zeremonielle Souveränität an der pazifischen Nordwestküste. In: Monique Scheer / Pamela E. Klassen (Hg.): Der Unterschied, den Weihnachten macht. Differenz und Zugehörigkeit in multikulturellen Gesellschaften. Tübingen: TVV, 2019.