Secularisms: Critical Secularism Studies

Catalog description

This course is an introduction to the trans-disciplinary subfield known as “critical secularism studies.” The shared premises of this internally diverse field is that religion is made by people, that such religion-making can be described as secularism, and that secularist policies and epistemologies (secularity) offer the illusion of clarity while also introducing uncertainty. Scholars of critical secularism studies are generally critical of old-school narratives of secularization, but they are keenly attentive to the contradictions introduced by (post)colonial settings, industrial capitalism, and neoliberal economic formations. Scholars in this field see these contexts and historical processes as contributing to differentiation and diversification in fields conventionally marked by the terms “religion,” “government,” “economy,” “medicine,” and so forth. Because attending to secularist religion-making typically involves investigating shifting conceptions of public and private, the field has also developed strong critical work around questions of race, gender, sexuality, and (to a lesser extent) disability and class.