Religion and Public Memory in Multicultural Societies

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

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.