Keynote: “Rethinking modernity: spirituality, resistance and enchanted configurations of reality”
Deeply embedded in ideals of rationality and reason, we commonly envisage that to be modern discards the superstitious, uncanny and irrational. I will explore spirituality as modernity’s ‘Other’ through my fieldwork which follows people who draw on spirituality to resist the limitations that modernity’s socio-political order imposes on them.
Author bio:
Suzanne Klein Schaarsberg has a PhD from Aberystwyth University in International Politics. Her expertise lies at the intersection of politics and contemporary religiosity, with a particular interest in how narratives of modernity are being challenged through a mobilization of the occult, the esoteric and the uncanny. She currently is Assistant Professor Religion in the Public Domain at Tilburg University, working on her latest project titled “Trust your Gut not the System: the Anti-Establishment Politics of Spiritual Activists.”
Dr. Marian Burchardt, Universität Leipzig, Institut für Afrikastudien
Marian Burchardt
Keynote: “From Public Religion to Heritage Religion”
In my lecture, I critically review and engage with theories of public religion in order to pinpoint conceptual and normative ambivalences of the notion of the public. Following up on this, I develop the notion of ‘heritage religion’ and describe its relationships to public religions. Drawing on empirical material from Europe and Africa, I show how heritage religion is a simultaneously a product of secularization and culturalist collective mobilizations and that it hinges upon the iconic status of material symbols.
Author bio:
Marian Burchardt is a professor of sociology at the University of Leipzig. His research interests involve medical anthropology, the sociology of religion, urban sociology, and studies of gender, sexuality and the body. He is the author of Faith in the Times of AIDS (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and the coeditor of Topographies of Faith: Religion in Urban Spaces (Brill, 2013), Religion and AIDS Treatment in Africa (Ashgate, 2015), Beyond Neoliberalism: Social Analysis After 1989 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and Affective Trajectories: Religion and Emotion in African Cityscapes (Duke, 2020). His work appeared in Sociology of Health and Illness, International Sociology, Current Sociology, Sociology of Religion, Social Compass, and Comparative Sociology. He has been a visiting research fellow at the New School for Social Research in New York, the Université de Montréal, the Autonomous University Barcelona, and Stellenbosch University. His current work explores the role of new infrastructures and technologies in global health assemblages.
