Call for applications UCSIA Summer School 2020

extended deadline: 15 April 2020

We would like to draw your attention to the call for applications for the 2020 UCSIA Summer School on 'Religion, Culture and Society'. This summer school is a one-week course, organized by the University Center Saint-Ignatius Antwerp and taking place from Sunday 23 August 2020 until Sunday 30 August 2020 at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. This year the program focusses on the topic 'Religion, Mobility and Politics'.

The UCSIA Summer School brings together a multidisciplinary and international group of 24 PhD students and postdoctoral scholars. Participation and stay for young scholars and researchers are free of charge, but participants should pay for their own travel expenses to Antwerp.

You can submit your application via the online submission form on the summer school website. The completed file as well as all other required application documents must be submitted to the UCSIA selection committee no later than Wednesday 15 April 2020.

For further information about the program and application procedure, please visit our website.

Topic:

It is the aim of the interdisciplinary UCSIA summer school to investigate the dynamic interaction between macro-level developments and bottom-up approaches in the fields of religion and culture and the way in which this may induce innovative synergies and/or provoke new and old forms of confrontation.

The UCSIA Summer School 2020 is the second edition of the three-year cycle that focuses on the impact of mobility on the global and local religious landscape.

Mobility has long defined religious traditions and their vital presence in our contemporary world. This one-week summer school will focus on the diversity of religions on the move and the politics of religion and religious difference. We welcome papers based on original research that examine these themes from a variety of disciplines including anthropology, history, sociology, political science, and theology. Papers may address, but are not limited to the following questions:

• What defines a religion and its boundaries? When religions are on the move, where do we locate its forms and expressions (e.g. its theological contents or its material elements)? What characterizes religious transformations like conversions, revivals, or disavowals of religion?
• What are the politics of religious mobility? What institutions, secular and spiritual alike, shape the migration and circulation of religions? How do the sacred geographies associated with traditions intersect with the geopolitics of nation-states or international regimes of sovereignty?
• What are the global, transnational, and transregional aspects of religion? How do flows of capital and labour, as well as older routes of trade, shape religious growth and decline? What influences do these flows have on religious beliefs and practices? What histories of colonialism and/or socialism impact the ways religions disseminate and relocate?

Guest lecturers are:

• Jayeel Serrano Cornelio, Associate Professor and Director of the Development Studies Program at the Ateneo de Manila University.
• David Henig, Associate Professor, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University
• Angie Heo, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sociology of Religion at Divinity School, University of Chicago.