The kippah is a powerful symbol of Judaism. However, as many Jews hide their kippah to avoid discrimination, it increasingly signifies anxieties surrounding the vulnerability of Jewish minorities. This project takes a material religious form, the kippah, as an entry point into the study of ethno-religious inclusion and exclusion in pluralist societies. By researching “kippah controversies” from the 19th-century to today – in transnational Jewish settings across North America, Europe, and Israel – the project explores how the kippah became a marker of Jewishness, how different Jewish groups contest its meaning, and how it shapes ongoing debates over Jewish in/visibility.

Summary: This book examines narratives of individual religious transformation in Western European literature and culture. Religious individuals, themes, experiences and communities are widely represented in diverse literature and culture, including literary texts and visual arts and media. Taking the subject of religious transformation as an angle from which to study constructions of religion, gender and race, this book reveals through various case studies what authors, documentary makers, film makers and playwrights consider to be important (possible) shifts between the old and the new, continuities and discontinuities, and the formation of the self. The chapters demonstrate how individual religious transformations are understood to be shaped by various intersections of difference, and point at the need to consider gender as always related to and co-constructing religion and race. This transdisciplinary and intimate study provides a fresh lens through which to examine pressing questions regarding the place and future of religion, gender and race in contemporary Western Europe.

Current research on secularity no longer understands the secular as the decline of the religious. Rather, secularity refers to a particular configuration of religion, state, society, and science. By retracing configurations of secularity in contemporary India, the proposed research will contribute a much needed empirical and cross-cultural perspective to a largely theoretical debate focused on Europe and North America. Taken as an analytical category, secularity permits to uncover the cultural foundations of contemporary forms of religion and non-religion alike. For this purpose, anthropological fieldwork in the environment of a south Indian centre for atheism will be combined with philological analyses of the as yet hardly researched literary genre of Indian spiritual non-fiction. With recourse to new institutional theories it will be possible to fathom not only the ideological, but also the pragmatic and material aspects of secularity and retrace how they translate into concrete practices of individuals.

What is Europe? The image of European integration as a purely economic project is fundamentally incomplete. From its inception, European integration also offered a moral framework – often inspired by Christian churches – that allowed traumatised societies to face a new future. The present atmosphere of crisis in the EU once again raises pressing questions about the history that brought us to this point. The EU’s own historiography is, however, dominated by post facto depictions of inter-state bargaining and the EU’s infamous ’muddling through‘. Europe’s ’emotional vocabulary for hope and integration‘, for example, has been systematically overlooked. The pre-history and early years of European integration were nonetheless marked by intensive discussions about the future of Europe, encompassing a variety of blueprints for a new order, ranging from ’ordo-liberalism‘ to socialism. It is in these ’battles of the blueprints‘ that we find the origins of the EU and many of the trajectories travelled by the EU since those early years. The proposed project aims to piece together an inventory of these blueprints, and to analyse the institutional workings that sprang from their confrontation. In order to do so, we shift the scope from states to transnational networks – including ecclesiastical networks – as the crucial plan-making in those early years (1) worked across the national frontiers, (2) cross-cut political families, (3) channelled collective and political emotions, and (4) fuelled decisive coalition formation during negotiations. Our approach enables us to collect untapped empirical material, design a blueprints-catalogue and build a discourse dataset.

This project starts from the observation that in recent decades the public perception of both religion and sexual diversity has changed fundamentally. While religion is increasingly considered to be a private matter, sexual diversity has gained public importance. And whereas religious identity, long accepted as a matter of course, steadily has become contested in its public and most characteristic manifestations, acceptance of sexual diversity is now often presented as a prerequisite for modern citizenship. Conflicts about religion and homosexuality are, therefore, an important source for studying the connecting and dividing functions of religion in contemporary society. This project, then, focuses on the strategic and ideological assumptions, interests, and effects of present-day constructions of (homo)sexuality and religion in public discourse. Its aim is to map out the social, political, and cultural dimensions of framing religion and homosexuality as polarized constructs. The central question is: how are religion and homosexuality construed as oppositional pairings in contemporary Dutch society? The central (PhD) project will uncover and analyze oppositional pairings of religion and homosexuality in political debates, public counseling and information, and popular culture. Two postdoctoral projects put the research in a comparative perspective by looking into recent history (1946 to 2005) and three other European countries (Sweden, Serbia, and Spain). The critical analysis, bearing on feminism and queer studies, will unmask stereotypes and uncover subtexts with alternative constructions of both homosexuality and religion, contributing to ways of overcoming the polarized state of affairs. Dit project wordt uitgevoerd in samenwerking met COC Nederland, Samenwerkingsverband van Marokkaanse Nederlanders, EduDivers, Movisie, Rutgers WPF, Werkverband van Queer Theologen, Bureau Intermonde (Nieuwe Moskee), Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap, Evangelische Broedergemeente, IHLIA, ForumC, Stichting LKP.