Glocal Religiosities: An interdisciplinary research programme

Advancing globalisation leads to complex interdependencies, mutual dependencies and reciprocal influences, which are clearly evident in ideological and cultural transformation processes. Identities and affiliations are thus increasingly emerging in the field of tension between local traditions and global narratives - visible in Arts, social media, political and social discourses and everyday culture, for example. Religions and religious phenomena are also involved in these processes. They operate in a dynamic field in which global references are interwoven with local practices, individual experiences and collective foundations of meaning. These religious forms of expression are not only interrelated, but are also closely networked with other knowledge systems and with secular and post-secular developments in politics, society and science.

The graduate centre researches these multi-layered entanglements, as they occur in modernity and late modernity in particular. The focus is on social forms of action, religious convictions and experiences - both of individual and collective actors - as well as the resulting practices and patterns of interpretation that can be understood or interpreted as an expression of religiosity.

To analyse these complex interrelationships of religious and social life, we draw on a broad range of methodological and theoretical instruments from the cultural and social sciences. In doing so, we combine a historically based understanding of religious traditions with empirically supported studies that consider global processes together with local contexts. This results in transcultural perspectives that take the concrete localisation of religious practices just as seriously as their integration into global discourses and structures.

Research is conducted, for example, into

• Historical dynamics and their effects,
• global-local entanglements of individual developments,
• concrete practices (lived religion and its performative aspects),
• colonial dependencies and their post-colonial after-effects,
• specific contexts of meaning,
• constructions of multi-layered and complex religious identities in the context of global dynamics,
• social and political roles of religious institutions in glocal transformation processes,
• connections between religion and society, politics, economics and ecology,
• gender, diversity and class issues in the religious context (intersectionality).

Both historical disciplines with a religious focus and theological and religious studies approaches that examine current phenomena are suitable for work in the Centre. These are complemented by empirical and hermeneutic disciplines such as sociology, political science and other cultural studies disciplines.

At the centre is a transdisciplinary research culture that combines two perspectives: a historical (vertical) and a transcultural (horizontal) one. This breadth is ensured by the expertise of the supervisors, the involvement of other colleagues from the University of Erfurt and cooperation with international partners.