Since the turn of the millennium, migration to Europe has significantly increased. Individuals have come to this continent often fleeing conflict and political instability as well as seeking improved social and economic wellbeing. For migrants, engagement in religious practice is a key resource in the post-migration period. Religious activities and infrastructure offer practical and spiritual support, as well as being a source of social belonging for newly arriving migrants. These factors often help individuals navigate structural inequalities, for example, facilitating access to social services. Yet, they may also reproduce inequality, for example when religious authority is used to regulate behaviour within these groups and/or to foster prejudice and discrimination against other groups. At the same time, these dynamics unfold within European contexts shaped by varied secularisation trajectories, which influence how religious practices are perceived and negotiated in everyday life. This panel examines encounters between migrant religious communities and other religious and secular groups within these shifting contexts. Such encounters often involve material transformations: repurposed religious buildings, adapted ritual forms and new uses of public space, which might extend to the digital realm. They also generate embodied and sensorial experiences and modes of expression that engage sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. 

Analysing these encounters from perspectives that are intersectional/multidimensional can help gain significant insights into how changes in gender-, age-, and social-status related dynamics happen in religious communities who experience migration processes.

We invite papers exploring how, through these entanglements, religious traditions are reinterpreted and transformed and, in turn, contribute to shaping contemporary and future European societies.

Panel Organisers: Farah Hasan (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Susanna Trotta (Humboldt University Berlin), Chair: Valeria Fabretti (Bruno Kessler Foundation, Trento)

Feel free to email farah.hasan@mail.huji.ac.il  or susanna.trotta@hu-berlin.de if you have any questions.