Spaces for the Future: Religion in Urban Place-Making

Mary Hancock
Anthropology and History
UC Santa Barbara

Smriti Srinivas
Anthropology
UC Davis

This working group focused on the ways that religious ideas, practices, and sites (i.e. various forms of religiosity) associated with different traditions were implicated in what has often been treated as either the preeminent space of the secular or the site of religion’s violent return. The group asked, instead: how are forms of religiosity yoked to urban spaces and civic futures? By bringing together scholars whose theoretical and ethnographic concerns lie at the intersection of the study of urban formations and religion (broadly defined), this collaboration developed inter-campus research and curricular initiatives that were comparative and cross-disciplinary and address the relationship between religion and urban place-making.