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About our future project
About our future project
We plan to build "Entangled Encounters" as a research network that explores the intersections of religion and migration in Europe through the lens of postmigrant societies. It grows out of the DFG-NRF funded International Research Training Group Transformative Religion: Religion as Situated Knowledge in Processes of Social Transformation (2022–2026) and brings the notions of entangled encounters, religion as situated knowledge and postmigrant society into conversation with each other.
The network takes as its starting point the German context, where the notion of the postmigrant society emerged in debates concerning migration and integration in the early 2010s. This framework understands society as inherently and historically shaped by migration movements, questions nation-state-oriented assumptions and moves away from us/them or natives/foreigners binaries through postcolonial and decolonial perspectives.
Within this framework, Entangled Encounters focuses on religious practices and actors that have so far received limited analysis in migration studies, especially from a bottom-up perspective. It examines embodied encounters between different religious communities and between secular and religious groups, from individual practice and grassroots initiatives to institutional governance, space-sharing practices and organised programmes.
The network asks how migration experience influences religious formation, sedimentation, unfolding and transformation, and how factors such as race, gender, age and other societal issues, including the climate crisis, intersect with experiences connected to religion and migration.
Entangled Encounters aims to build an interdisciplinary network of academics whose research addresses different aspects of religion in the postmigrant experience. It seeks to create and strengthen non-hierarchical exchange and to establish vibrant, multifaceted and multidirectional exchange through targeted scholarly and participatory formats.
Our network will soon be hosted by the CITRS (Center for Interreligious Theology and Religious Studies — CITRS) of Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
Contact us
Contact us
Researchers interested in participating in the network or learning more about its activities are warmly invited to contact the Co-founders
Farah Hasan (mail@farah-hasan.com | farah.hasan@mail.huji.ac.il) and Susanna Trotta (susanna.trotta@hu-berlin.de) via e-mail.
Why did you see the flower bouquet?
The flower bouquet stands for the project because it shows how seeing is never neutral. What we notice in an image, and how we interpret it, is shaped by our cultural, religious and personal backgrounds. This is why the idea of religion as situated knowledge is central to the project: knowledge is always rooted in a specific situation, context and perspective.
In the picture, different elements come together: a Japanese vase, flowers from all over the world, dried blossoms that may symbolise the moment, vanity or preservation likewise, and the blue colour of the vase, which may evoke Mary as a figure who connects Muslim and Christian traditions. The flower bouquet therefore becomes an example of an entangled encounter: it brings together objects, symbols and interpretations from different contexts and shows how meaning emerges through their relation.
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