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Dear colleagues and friends,

on behalf of our directors Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Christoph Kleine we would like to invite you to our upcoming final conference on Eight Years CASHSS "Multiple Secularities": Outcome and Prospects through the Eyes of our Interlocutors (12-14 October 2023, Leipzig University).

The occasion for this conference is the end of the eight-year funding period of the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” next year. Over the course of these eight years, dozens of fellows from various countries and different disciplines, working on a diverse range of regions and historical focuses, have helped us tremendously to discuss, reflect and sharpen our concept of multiple secularities, to underpin it empirically and to theorise it more thoroughly. We are extremely grateful for this highly productive exchange. We want to get together once again with our interlocutors and discuss what has been achieved, to celebrate the encounters made here, and the community that this project has enabled with colleagues around the world. We want to recapture the constructive and engaging atmosphere for discussions that has been a hallmark of the Centre for most of its existence and would be very pleased if you would join us for this occasion.

This special newsletter gives you a preview of the conference programme. We look forward to meeting you and having a productive and lively exchange at our final conference!

Please register for the conference via multiple-secularities@uni-leipzig.de by 25 September. Most sessions will take place in a hybrid format, on-site and via zoom, please indicate whether you will be attending on-site or online.

Keynote Lecture by Reinhard Schulze

Reinhard Schulze will inaugurate our conference with a keynote lecture on The Normative Status of Secularity and Islamic Genealogies of Worldliness.

In the course of its research activities, the KFG "Multiple Secularities" has successfully worked on the development of a new research paradigm that focuses on a synchronic as well as diachronic examination of global processes of differentiation of religious and secular orders. It remains a matter of debate whether "secularity" can be expanded into an analytical concept that could serve as a key term for a transcultural theory of the modern order of religion and the world. It is still undecided whether (1) there can be a global theory of secularity at all beyond the nominalistic content of the term and, if so, whether (2) such a "realist" theory can also be applied diachronically to traditions for which the term "secularity" has not been empirically documented. Furthermore, (3) the question must be clarified how the process leading to the differentiation of a normative order into religious and worldly orders can be modelled historiographically. Finally, (4) it is to be determined more precisely whether, in a world-historical perspective, there is today a normative order that has standardised the religion and secularity order, and, if so, how they have genealogically converged in a standardised order of modern "secularity". Reinhard Schulze will pursue these questions in the context of the history of the Islamic tradition and propose preliminary answers.

12 October 2023 | 7 pm (CET)
Bibliotheca Albertina, Lecture Hall
Beethovenstraße 6, 04107 Leipzig
and online via zoom

The main part of the conference will consist of 9 panels with a total of 29 presentations, bringing together colleagues working on various regions and historical focuses and from many disciplines, to reflect on the Multiple Secularities approach.

Secularity and Modernity

• Secularities contra Positivism: A Scoreboard
  Neguin Yavari (New York)
• Multiple Secularities and Pre-adaptive Advances to Modernity: A Perspective of Social Emergence
  Dietrich Jung (University of Southern Denmark)
• Religion and the Constitution of the Modern: An Analysis of the Views of Tagore and Ambedkar
  Rinku Lamba (National Law School of India University)

Conceptual Explorations of the Multiple Secularities Framework

• Multiple Secularities' Conceptual Framework and the Study of Islamic Secularities: Conceptual and Critical Considerations
  Housamedden Darwish (Cologne University)
• Reflexive Secularity: A Conceptual Exploration
  Hubert Seiwert (KFG "Multiple Secularities") 
• Using and Rethinking Multiple Secularities in Latin America: Analyzing and Historicizing the Secular Subject/s
  Edgar Zavala-Pelayo (El Colegio de México)

(Post-)Ottoman Secularities

• The Religionization of Din in the Late Ottoman Period
  Markus Dreßler (Leipzig University)
• Negotiating Secularity: Post-Ottoman Muslims in Bosnia 1878—2020
  Wolfgang Höpken (KFG "Multiple Secularities")
• Rethinking the Religious History of Turkey and Alevis through the Concept of "Multiple Secularities"
  Gökçen Beyinli-Dinç (Hamburg University)

Multiple Trajectories

• Multiple Secularisms in Colonial India
  Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav (ICAS:M.P., New Delhi)
• The Multiple Secularities Approach as a Middle-Range Cultural Theory: Interpreting the Secular State Project on Madagascar, and beyond
  Peter Kneitz (Leipzig)
• What Does 'Religio-Political' Even Mean? The Diachronic Perspective on Bhutan as an Empirical and Theoretical Case Study
  Dagmar Schwerk (Leipzig University) 
• Secularization and Doubt in Buddhist Societies
  Sven Bretfeld (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)

Multiple Secularities and Global Histories

• Multiple Secularities and 'Global Religious History': Recent Innovations in the German Study of Religion
  Adrian Hermann (Bonn University) 
• Multiple Secularities and the Case for India’s Secular Imaginary
  Sushmita Nath (Ashoka University) 
• Conceptual History and Multiple Secularities: The Global Diffusion of Arguments from Epistemes/Ontologies/Worldviews
  Todd Weir (University of Groningen)

Secularities: Beyond Modernity?

• Situating Medicine and Religion in Asia
  Michael Stanley-Baker (Nanyang Technological University)
• History of Religious Coexistence in India
  Rajeev Bhargava (Parekh Institute of Indian Thought)
• Signs of Secularity in Latin America
  Roberto Blancarte (El Colegio de México)

Modes of Secularity: Performativity, Materiality, Affectivity

• From Gestural Communication of the Religious and Secular to Functional Amalgam of the Religious and Secular
  Augustine Agwuele (Texas State University)
• How to make a Zulu King
  Magnus Echtler (KFG "Multiple Secularities")
• Materiality and Secularity
  Birgit Meyer (Utrecht University)
• An Affective Material Approach to Multiple Secularities
  Nur Yasemin Ural (KFG "Multiple Secularities")

Thinking Beyond Multiple Secularities

• Beyond the concept: Research Agenda Based on the Heuristic Potential of Multiple Secularities
  Juan Cruz Esquivel (CONICET / Universidad de Buenos Aires)
• From Multiple Secularities to Social Welfare: Beyond the West, and Beyond Modernities
  André Laliberté (University of Ottawa)
• Possible Futures for Multiple Secularities Research
  Jason Josephson Storm (Williams College)

Secularity and Governance

• Nonreligion in a Complex Future: Rethinking the Secular, Secularism and Secularity
  Lori Beaman (University of Ottawa)
• Multiple Secularities, Secularism and the Specters of Race
  Marian Burchardt (Leipzig University)
• Multiple Secularities, Post-Coloniality, and the Indian Conundrum
  Anindita Chakrabarti (IIT Kanpur)

The panel sessions will take place in a hybrid format, on-site and via zoom.

Panel Discussion: Contested Secularities - A Global Scenario

The closing session of our final conference will be a panel discussion entitled 
Contested Secularities - A Global Scenario.

The interest in distinctions and differentiations between religion and the secular – which we call secularity – is not merely academic. It touches deeply on societal struggles and sometimes even goes along with culture wars. This often concerns the relationship between the state and religion. However, everyday life, the family, education, science, and a variety of cultural spheres can also become battlegrounds. This panel will bring different cases, e.g. from Turkey, India, Iran, Russia and Israel, together to discuss them in comparison and relate them to the academic debate.

14 October | 3.30 pm (CET)
Bibliotheca Albertina, Lecture Hall
Beethovenstraße 6, 04107 Leipzig