Meeting of the international Research Consortium sIMAGINE and workshop "Religion, Community, Borders", May 22-24, 2018

RaT is part of the international consortium sIMAGINE, which is based in Utrecht/Brussels. sIMAGINE connects members of several institutions from the Netherlands, Belgium, the United States, Great Britain and Austria. The common research project is titled “Social Imaginaries between Secularity and Religion in a Globalizing World”. It aims at making the notion of social imaginaries (Charles Taylor and others) productive for current social and political questions at the intersection of religion and secularity. Social imaginaries are images in a broad sense that shape our perception and attitude towards the world both individually and collectively. They are more fluid than for example fixed coherent worldviews. Several social imaginaries can co-exist, even if they compete.

The second meeting of the consortium took place from May 22-24, 2018 in Vienna and was co-organized and hosted by RaT. Internally, the three areas of Religion, Community, Borders (1), Social Imaginaries of Inclusion and Decoloniality (2) and The Transformative Power of Artful Articulations of Social Imaginaries (3) were discussed. On the first topic, an open workshop took place on May 23^rd. Stewart Hoover and Nabil Echchaibi (University of Colorado Boulder), members of sIMGAGINE, as well as  Hans Schelkshorn, Michael Staudigl and Rüdiger Lohlker from the university of Vienna und Christina Gwschandtner from Fordham University (New York) gave talks and sparked an animated, productive discussion.

The Programme of the Workshop can be downloaded here.