Anneliese Maier - Forschungspreis

01.06.2015

Religion and Public Memory in Multicultural Societies

This five-year collaborative project will bring together an international group of scholars and students with a particular interest in how the contested—and sometimes celebrated—categories of religion and multiculturalism shape, provoke, and complicate projects of public memory. These projects, such as museums, monuments, digital platforms, and truth and reconciliation commissions, tell stories of the past for many different reasons: critical reflection, celebration, education, healing and reconciliation. In countries with steady flows of immigration, audiences of great religious, ethnic, political, and generational diversity are called to remember a past that they may not claim as their own. This call to remember is an appeal mediated through genres of storytelling and memorialization—such as the testimony and confession or the artifact enclosed in a museum’s glass case—that make more sense in some religious or cultural contexts than others.
Working from a comparative perspective in terms of both region and discipline, the project will include scholars from across the humanities, including study of religion, anthropology, history, museum studies, and Aboriginal studies, who focus on North American and European contexts from the 19th-21st centuries. A series of workshops and conferences will form the basis for collaborative publications.
We undertake this five-year conversation about how religion and multiculturalism intersect in sites of public memory at the same time that religion is newly mobilized and even fetishized in public discourse, and that multiculturalism as state policy attracts loud defenders, critics, and assailants. Our goal, then, is to forward rigorous reflection on how the media, material, and rhetorics of memorializing the past profoundly shape the present.