The first lecture of the GRITIM-UPF seminar series will be held by Maria del Mar Griera (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona).

Mar Griera is the Director of the ISOR research group and (interim) Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She earned her doctorate in Sociology in 2009 with a thesis, on public policy and religious diversity, that received the Outstanding Thesis Award (2010) from the UAB and the Manuel Sales i Ferré Prize from the Institute of Catalan Studies (2011). She has been a visiting researcher at the Observatoire des Religions at Université de Lausanne (2016), at the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University (2009), the University of Amsterdam (2008), the University of Exeter (2006) and the University of Strasbourg (2004). She is a founding member of the Religion & Public Institutions Research Network, as well as a member of the IESR (Institut Européen en Sciences des Religions, Paris).

Date: 7th February 2019

Time: 18:00 – 21:00

Place: UPF – Campus Ciutadella, Room 40.246.

Title: Religion in the streets: visibility, governance and the politics of space in the city of Barcelona

Abstract: Contemporary public space is witnessing a rise in religious expressions that reflect both the revitalization of religious identities at global level and the increase in religious pluralism in urban contexts.  More and more, religious groups are taking religion to the streets in an attempt to defend or challenge existing definitions of public space, to launch symbolic claims to territory, or to demonstrate communities’ willingness to participate in society. Departing from an empirical study, this presentation focuses on examining how moral imaginations and related affective dimensions shape the spatialization of religion(s) and the enactment of governmental regulations over public religious expressions in the city of Barcelona. More specifically, the aim is to compare among Buddhist, Sikh, Catholic and Islamic open-air religious events in order to understand how conceptions of ideal public space, regimes of urban visibility and public emotional registers are configured and mobilized in the governance of religious public expressions. The presentation shows how power constellations and postcolonial imaginations of the Near-Eastern’ Other –Muslim- and of the ‘Far-Eastern’ Other –Buddhist- (Obadia, 2015) have consequences in the configuration of urban governance regimes as well as practical implications for religious groups. The arguments of this paper are based on a collaborative empirical research project aimed at analysing public religious expressions in the cities of Barcelona and Madrid.

Recommended readings:

• Burchardt, M., & Griera, M. (2018). To see or not to see: explaining intolerance against the “Burqa” in European public space. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1-19.
• Griera, M. (forthcoming). Religious visibilities and the politics of space in the neoliberal city, under revision.

For the upcoming GRITIM-UPF seminars, please visit this link.