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Dear friends and colleagues,

We are happy to welcome our new Senior Research Fellow Augustine Agwuele to our KFG, who will present his research project at next week’s colloquium. At the same time, we have to say goodbye to our long-time Associate Senior Researcher Housamedden Darwish, who stayed with us for more than three years.

This Friday and Saturday the workshop “Muslim Minorities and Questions of Secularity in China and Beyond” is coming up, and you can still register as a listener. In two weeks, the KFG Workshop “Material Secularities” will take place; we would like to share the programme with you today. We also have a publication by a KFG member for you, a note about a summer school and an event update.

Enjoy and have a good week!

Anja & Lucy

Next week’s Colloquium: Augustin Agwuele on “Religionization and Secularization of communicative gestures among Yoruba people”, 14 June

Next Wednesday, our Senior Research Fellow Augustine Agwuele will give a presentation on his research project “Religionization and Secularization of communicative gestures among Yoruba people” at our colloquium.

The colloquium will take place in a hybrid format (on-site and online). In the Member Area you will find more information including preparatory readings and the zoom connection data.

14 June | 9.15–11.45 am (CEST)

Strohsack, Room 4.55 and online via zoom

Workshop on “Muslim Minorities and Questions of Secularity in China and Beyond”, 9–10 June at Leipzig University

This week, the workshop “Muslim Minorities and Questions of Secularity in China and Beyond” will take place from 9 to 10 June. The two-day interdisciplinary workshop investigates the role of secularity in the formation and normalization of Muslim minorities, with a focus on China.

You are welcome to register as a listener by sending us an e-mail indicating the type of participation (on-site or online). We will then send you the zoom connection data.      

9–10 June

Strohsack, Room 4.55 and online via zoom

KFG-Workshop: “Material Secularities”, 21–23 June at Leipzig University

We would also like to remind you of the KFG-Workshop on “Material Secularities”, convened by our Senior Research Fellow Birgit Meyer and our Senior Researchers Magnus Echtler and Nur Yasemin Ural.

Taking a fresh look at the secular from a material angle, the workshop convenors would like to engage with recent debates on ontology, relationality, and non-human actors that consider things, discourses, and symbols as relevant elements of affective, sensual and aesthetic experiences/expressions.

You are welcome to register as a listener by sending us an e-mail indicating the type of participation (on-site or online). We will then send you the zoom connection data in good time prior to the event.    

21–23 June

Strohsack, Room 4.55 and online via zoom

Update on Event “Gezi: 10 Years After” with Exhibitions “Library of Resistance” and “Divergent Roads of History: The Authoritarian Decade of Turkey” curated by Nil Mutluer and Murat Özbank, 26 May–25 June in Berlin

Last week, we announced the exhibitions “Library of Resistance” and “Diverging Roads of History” as well as panel discussion events, all to be organized within the framework of GEZI: 10 YEARS AFTER at Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin. Our colleague Nil Mutluer from the Institute for the Study of Religions at Leipzig University has co-curated the exhibitions and will contribute to some of the panel discussions. Here is an update on the panel programme.

Exhibition from 26 May–25 June

18 June: Panel “Gezi Goes global: The Future of Democracy and Authoritarianism in Turkey and the World” with participation of Nil Mutluer

Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin

Crossculture Religious Studies Summer School on “Ecological Crisis and Religions”, 31 July–4 August in Salzburg

Our ecosystem is under extraordinary stress, the predominantly human-made ecological crisis can no longer be overlooked and raises the question of the helpful contribution of religions in overcoming it. This is because religions and the ecological crisis, as cultural products of human beings, are intertwined in many ways. The second Summer School of the Crossculture Religious Studies Project at the University of Salzburg/Austria focuses on the topic “Ecological Crisis and Religions”. It offers diverse contributions from the religious studies perspective of Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Indonesian and African tribal religions and other religion-related perspectives with representatives from the partner universities of the Crossculture Religious Studies project: Nairobi, Seoul, Munich, Haifa, Varanasi, Yogyacarta.

Participation is open to all interested and registration possible by 30 July.

31 July – 4 August | University of Salzburg

If you have any content that you think suits the purpose of the weekly, please feel free to send it to us at multiple-secularities@uni-leipzig.de.