AFTER SECULARISM · Rethinking Secularity in the light of Contemporary Religious Revival: Female Religious Agency

Final Activity Report Summary - AFTER SECULARISM (Rethinking Secularity in the light of Contemporary Religious Revival: Female Religious Agency)

The 'AFTER SECULARISM' research project was grounded in the question of women's engagement in contemporary religious movements that challenged contemporary secular arrangements, which was a question that some scholars have named 'a paradox'. It was a question that needed to be situated in the light of a marked increase in religious identifications and challenges to the secular status quo, with a clear emphasis on religious revival movements concerning moral issues of family, sexuality and kinship, including pronounced positions on gender arrangements and women's roles and behaviour, and on the great participation of women in such movements. Moreover, the question presented itself with a particular theoretical urgency, as it challenges established frameworks of accounting for religion in the contemporary world, particularly for the intersection between gender, or sexual difference, religion and secularism. The research project was theoretically situated on the intersection between social theory on modernity, religion and the secular and feminist theory, geo-politically located in Europe. The project was also empirically grounded on a previous doctoral research project on women in Christian and Islamic movements in various European countries and included a sustained attention to epistemological concerns. A first line of inquiry focused on the notion of female religious agency. Different ways of thinking about human agency were explored in relation to religion and the secular assumptions of the process in social and feminist theories on agency were identified. Moreover, it was estimated fruitful to discuss questions of religious agency under the light of theories of subjectivity, based on which the project proposed an understanding of female religious subjectivities. A second line of inquiry focused on the theoretical frameworks that related religion to modernity and, more in particular, secularisation theories. The project set off by exploring the notion of 'multiple modernities' but proceeded with elaborating an understanding of 'the post-secular' as a way to characterise a novel condition of modern societies in relation to religious developments and transformations of the secular. The project proposed a number of innovative interventions in these contemporary discussions of a 'post-secular' condition. Moreover, the question of how gender or sexual difference mattered in this 'post-secular' conjuncture was central to the project. These theoretical developments and innovations were made public through many presentations at conferences and publications, as well as through an intensive transfer of knowledge, via lectures and teaching, during the third and last period of the fellowship.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union