It is with great pleasure that we announce the first meeting of the 2021 academic year.
The seminar is entitled Lingering legacies of toleration in the nation state: integration, secularisation, and privatisation of religion, by Marietta van der Tol.
Marietta van der Tol shares with us a chapter of her PhD-dissertation “Politics of Religious Diversity: Toleration, Religious Freedom and Visibility of Religion in Public space” (University of Cambridge, 2020). She considers legacies of toleration in the nation state, constellations of ethnic and religious othering that are inherent to the nation, and echoes thereof in the normativity of integration, secularisation and the privatisation of religion. While the literature of structures and institutions that negatively impact racialised minorities flourishes, the question is to which extent integration, secularisation and the privatisation of religion might too represent structures that negatively impact ethnic and religious minorities.
Marietta is Alfred Landecker Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government (University of Oxford). Marietta is Principal Investigator of the twinned-project ‘Protestant political thought: religion, state, nation’ and ‘Religion, ethnicity and politics in German, Dutch and Anglo-American contexts: nationalism and the future of democracy’ (Blavatnik School of Government / Centre for Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge). Recent publications include the collection From Toleration to Religious Freedom: Cross-Discipinary Perspectives (2021) and 'The "Jew," the Nation and Assimilation: The Old Testament and the Fashioning of the "Other" in German and Dutch Protestant Political Thought' (2021).
We ask you to please read the introduction (1-20) and chapter 5 (110-131) from Marietta’s thesis, which can be found here.
We are meeting on Zoom at 15:00 Netherlands time. The Zoom link has been distributed via our email list. If you would like to receive it (again), please email [email protected].