Call for Papers

Date: October 27-29, 2021

Venue: Centre for Advanced Studies, Leipzig University

Abstract Submission Deadline: June 13, 2021

Convenors: Marian Burchardt and Nur Yasemin Ural (both Leipzig University)

This workshop seeks to explore the contours of the politics around cultural heritage and the ways it is enmeshed with the religious-secular dynamics in societies past and present. We suggest that these concerns manifest in three substantive ways, each provoking suggestive research questions: legal frames, immaterial values, and material patrimony.

What is at stake when cultural goods are defined as religious or non-religious cultural heritage? In the latter case, heritagization means that religious items are culturalized and thus secularized thereby acquiring the status of secular-sacred. This raises the question how the redesignation of cultural goods from religious-sacred to secular-sacred shapes people’s affects as they engage with them.

More information on: Multiple Secularities Project