EU486      Half Unit
Religion in Contemporary Europe: Race, Identity and Culture in Conflict

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

For several decades secularisation theorists have been predicting the inevitable collapse of religion in contemporary society. This is particularly true for Europe where the secularising process is deeply entrenched both socially and politically. However, the question of religion remains significant in contemporary European discourse and that is through contouring notions of culture, society and politics. How far does religion shape the categories that go into understanding, interpreting and framing conflict in Europe? This course explores the question of religion and conflict through a number of contested categories including secularism, nationalism, coloniality, race, migration and sectarianism that bear on conflict in Europe and how this is reflected in the growth of populism, the notion of genocide or the contested place of Museums in European cities. The weekly reading will orientate the discussion on the theme by allowing a deeper analysis and reflection of these categories and how they figure in contemporary political, cultural and identitarian debates in Europe.

20 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.
2 hours of lectures in the Spring Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

A review session will be held at the start of the Spring Term to prepare for the online assessment.

Presentation

Essay (1200 words)

• Cesari Jocelyne, The Oxford Handbook for European Islam, 2014
• Nielsen Jorgen, Muslims in Western Europe, 2015
• Ozyurek, Esra. Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion, and Conversion in Contemporary Germany, 2014
• Journal of Muslims in Europe, Gilliat-Ray, Muslims in Britain 2010
• Luber Diana, Islam in Europe, 2023
• Daniel Norman, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image, 2009
• Rodinson Maxime, Europe and the Mystique of Islam, 1988
• Bowen John, Can Islam be French? Pluralism and Pragmatism in a Secularist State 2009
• Ansari Humayan, The Infidel Within, 2004
• Laurence, Jonathan, Emancipating Muslims 2012
• Bowen John, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves, 2006
• Cesari Jocelyne, When Islam and Democracy Meet: Muslims in Europe and United States; Lewis Bernard, The Muslim Discovery of Europe, 2000
• Garcia Humberto, Islam and the English Enlightenment 1670-1840
• Said Edward, Orientalism 1978
• Balibar, Etienne 1991
• Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’? Bunzl, Matti. 2005
• “Between Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Some Thoughts on the New Europe.”; Philip Gorski, ‘After Secularisation’, 2008

Written test (100%)

The written test for this course will be administered via Moodle. Questions will be made available at a set date/time and students will be given a set period in the ST to complete the answers to questions and upload their responses back into Moodle.