[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: International workshop, "New Religiosity in Migration, " Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, May 27-30, 2013

[Gonul Pultar]

International workshop on "New Religiosity in Migration"
Convenors: Nelly Elias and Julia Lerner
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
May 27-30, 2013


What are the relations between a spiritual quest and an intercultural 
migration experience? Why immigrants become more religious than they 
were before immigrating? How do host national contexts influence 
immigrant religiosity? What are the patterns of immigrant religiosity 
within the global boom of religion and spiritual movements?  Based on 
these questions we suggest bringing together the research insights on 
immigrant religiosity emerging in the host cultural contexts and to 
examine new forms, languages and meanings constituted by this 
intercultural religious transformation.

The workshop will be organized as an exchange of ideas rising in 
empirical investigations of various migration contexts and immigrant 
groups in Israel, Europe, US and the post-Soviet space with a special 
focus on post-socialist spiritual trends and religious trajectories in 
the Russian-speaking diaspora. We believe that juxtaposition and 
comparison of different manifestations of migrant religiosity will 
encourage new ways of conceptualization of these phenomenon.

As a space of extensive migration, Israeli cultural and political 
context introduces a variety of immigrant groups that bring with them 
different religious and spiritual worldviews or reinvent them in their 
new country. In this sense Israel serves as a strategic location for a 
workshop on immigrant religiosity.  Apart from intellectual discussions 
we invite the participants to take advantage of the immediate 
surrounding and conduct fieldwork tours to the spaces of immigrant 
religiosity in the area.


We invite scholars from social and cultural studies of migration, 
contemporary religion, spirituality & new age, and post-socialist 
cultural condition to join our working colloquium organized according to 
the following themes:


Religiosity as a device of national belonging and citizenship

Religion provides symbols, rituals and scripts that immigrants can use 
to affirm, pass on, or reinvent their collective identity and position 
themselves vis-à-vis the host and the home countries.  Therefore, 
religion choices could teach us on migrants’ relocation strategies. In 
some national contexts the religious practices represent imitative 
adoption of the local cultural and political patterns, while in the 
other contexts they represent an alternative or resistance to the host 
society and its way of life.


Immigrant religion as acquisition of a new habitus

Any migration implies some degree of cultural change, all the more 
adopting religious rules and prescriptions of everyday practice in 
migration intensifies the need for adopting a new habitus.  Adult 
migrants work to change their everyday practice, body appearance and 
visibility, consumption behavior, social network, patterns of 
interpersonal communication and family relations. Using their new and 
old cultural repertoire, immigrants develop everyday strategies to keep 
and maneuver the cultural worlds they live in, separate or mix them
together.


Therapeutic powers of religion in migration

Migration and settling down in a new country are often associated with 
various individual and group “crises”: crisis of identify, psychological 
stress, family crisis etc. In this regard, religious affiliation and 
practice perform a therapeutic function when religious doctrine and 
religious community serve as an emotional shelter in the state of 
instability, as a surrogate family symbolically replacing distant 
relatives, or as a source for a new collective meaning instead of the 
one that was lost in migration. The proximity of psychological and 
religious discourses in the contemporary religious and spiritual 
movements makes the therapeutic appeal of religion in migration 
especially powerful and evident.


Immigrant religiosity as intercultural translation

Immigrant religiosity often involves work of intercultural 
interpretation, converting the code of the core religious ideas and 
symbols. As they acquire religious thinking and practice in a new 
language, immigrants learn simultaneously to speak locally and 
religiously. Reinventing their beliefs in a new context they are 
preoccupied with the translation of cultural ideas creating a hybrid 
religious code. This eclecticism becomes intertwined with the tendency 
of the contemporary religious and spiritual rhetoric to bring together 
discourses of different and even contradictory cultural origins.
Transnational immigrant religiosity and new media


Religious life in and through new media represents a crucial factor that 
affects the ways of belief and practice of contemporary religiosity. It 
is especially prominent for immigrant religious communities that cross 
and challenge national and cultural borders. Immigrants use new media 
platforms either to reestablish their affiliation with religious 
communities of their home countries or to create completely new local or 
transnational frames of belonging.


Those who wish to take part are invited to send us a short proposal (up 
to 250 words) of your research related to one of the workshop themes as 
well as your CV by October 5, 2012 to

julialer at bgu.ac.il

and

enelly at bgu.ac.il.

Answers are expected at November 15, 2012. Some contribution towards 
participants' expenses will be available.


About the workshop venue and the convenors:

The workshop is will be hosted by the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev 
(Beer Sheva, Israel). BGU is known for its expertise and extensive 
research on the issues of contemporary religion, migration and diaspora.

Prof. Nelly Elias and Dr. Julia Lerner are conducting a joint research 
on “Belief and Practice of Belonging: Religious Transformation of 
Post-Soviet Immigrants in Israel”.  The study traces the routes of the 
Russian-speaking religiosity in Israel, focusing on the newly 
established Christian and Jewish movements and communities.  Elias as a 
scholar of immigrant media (from the Department of Communication, BGU) 
and Lerner  as an anthropologist of knowledge (from the departments of 
Sociology and Anthropology, BGU), bring together their theoretical lens 
and emphasize the cultural and discursive turn of the new post-soviet 
religiosity manifested in immigrants’ narratives and experience of 
everyday life.




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