Alternative Visions in the Public Sphere

Over the last forty years, understandings of the public sphere have been dominated by secular discourses. Literature over the last twenty years has identified a renewed visibility of religion. Yet religion is a culturally specific category, identified most closely with Protestant Christianity, and so talk of its return raises questions of hegemony. Alongside secular and Christian discourses, this symposium seeks to give voice to alternative visions, representative of the vast array of religion and belief in the contemporary world.

Highlighting alternative visions and epistemologies is core to the aims of FaithXChange. As with all FaithXChange outputs and events, as well as encouraging papers from theology, sociology and anthropology, we are particularly interested in contributions that highlight how religion and belief play out in society, including but not limited to:


• Psychology
• Cultural studies
• Media and communication
• Literature
• History
• Law
• Art and design
• Music
• Film, theatre and performance
• Politics
• Public Policy
• Education
• Social work


Post-graduate students and early career scholars are highly encouraged to submit their abstract.

Contributions may include either papers or installations and performances. Papers should be limited to fifteen minutes excluding Q&A. Installations and performances may be in presentation form, in which case they too are limited to fifteen minutes. Installations may also be displayed throughout the symposium.
Abstracts should be no more than 300 words and should be sent at faithxchange@gold.ac.uk by November 13th, 2015. The symposium will tentatively result into an edited volume.

Informal enquiries on the symposium should be addressed to the organising committee at faithxchange@gold.ac.uk

For more information on the faithXchange network, please contact either Timothy Stacey [t.stacey@gold.ac.uk] or Panagiotis Pentaris [p.pentaris@gold.ac.uk]