Date: October 31 to November 2, 2016

Venue: The Sigtuna Foundation (Sigtuna, Sweden)

The Researching Religious Controversies Conference aims to discuss and delve into a range of themes and challenges that researchers may face when studying religious controversies, not least with regards to disseminating research findings to the wider public. The conference is organized and funded by CoMRel in collaboration with the Sigtuna Foundation. CoMRel is an acronym for the Scandinavian project Engaging with Conflicts in Mediatized Religious Environments, headed by Professor Knut Lundby at the University of Oslo. CoMRel researcher Mona Abdel-Fadil is the lead organizer of this event.

Please note that this conference has a particular twist to it. All paper presentations (or excerpts of these) are to be published on the Religion: Going Public blog. The Researching Religious Controversies Conference takes pride in its efforts to integrate public communication as a central part of the conference.

The Researching Religious Controversies Conference aims to:

• further develop the methodologies and theories of research on religious controversies
• improve public outreach strategies for academics studying controversial topics
• facilitate conversations across disciplines, research projects and countries
• generate blog posts for Religion: Going Public, in an effort to disseminate research presented at the conference to the general public in a reader-friendly manner.

pre-defined themes are:

• Religion, Conflict and Media
• Policies, lawmaking and case law related to religious controversies
• Civil society and religious controversy
• Challenges and experiences with blogging and public communication about religion and religious controversies

For more information see this.