EASR Conference 2014 NSRN Panel Call for Papers

Nations and Nonreligions – Understanding ‘Secular Europe’

Panel sponsored by the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network, chaired by NSRN co-director, Dr Lois Lee (UCL)

Whilst the vitality of religion was the chief interest emerging out of the secularisation paradigm, recent years have seen growing interest in the new populations that emerge from secularisation processes. This enables the historicisation of these populations and allows scholars to attend to the specificities and contingencies of non- or irreligious cultures and of people’s experience of secularity and secularism. This panel considers these experiences and cultures in national context and will enable cross-national comparison by bringing case studies from different national settings together, allowing continuities and discontinuities to emerge. The panel scrutinises the extent to which national variation is a useful way to differentiate nonreligious cultures.

We invite empirical papers, contemporary or historical, that explore nonreligious cultures or secular experiences within a national context from famously ‘secular’ Europe as well as theoretical papers investigating the relationship between nationalism and secularity and/or nonreligious in general.

This panel is sponsored by the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network (NSRN). The NSRN is an international and interdisciplinary network of researchers, founded in 2008 to centralise existing research on the topic of nonreligion and secularity and to facilitate discussion in this area. The NSRN co-runs an academic journal Secularism and Nonreligion (Ubiquity Press; run in partnership with the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture (ISSSC)) and a book series, Religion and Its Other: Studies in Religion, Nonreligion and Secularity (De Gruyter)