The Contending Modernities Global Migration working group will hold an interdisciplinary conference, The New Cosmopolitanism: Global Migration and the Building of a Common Life, Oct. 14-15, 2013.
The conference grows out of the working groups research project in London, which focuses on the ways that broad-based community organizing enables secular and religious citizens to build a common life. The conference will bring this research into dialogue with a wide range of theoretical and empirical research on the role of faith in public life in pluralist and culturally diverse societies. A keynote lecture will be given by The Most Reverend Diarmuid Martin, Archbishop of Dublin.
Paper proposals are due July 1, 2013.
The question of the place of religion in modern multicultural societies is not an academic one, but one of the most pressing ethical challenges of our age. The conference will consider this issue from theoretical and practical perspectives:
(1) How have global migration and the concept of multiculturalism created new challenges for the democracies of North America and Europe around understandings of citizenship, membership, democratic participation, religion in public life, and social justice? The conference organizers encourage paper submissions for panels that would consider these questions from the perspective of law, political philosophy, and theology.
(2) Faith-based community organizing in the inner city has become an important way for immigrants and migrants to forge community with neighbors across the boundaries of ethnicity, race, and religion on issues of economic, political, and social justice. It is also a vehicle for citizenship formation in multicultural settings. The conference organizers encourage paper submissions that analyze and explore the practical experience of organizing in urban settings that involve Catholic, Muslim, and secular groups.
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