Los Angeles: A microcosm for national conversations on religion, public life and deep diversity
A two year project between the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and CURA has resulted in a series of blog post articles on topics of “Global Migration and the New Cosmopolitanisms: Religion, Public Ethics, and Citizenship in Plural Societies”.
Find researcher Ahmet Selim Tekelioglu’s article on “Los Angeles: A microcosm for national conversations on religion, public life and deep diversity” on the University of Notre Dame’s blog Contending Modernities.
An excerpt from the article:
“The intellectual enterprise of talking about multiculturalism and pluralist co-existence carries an inherent tension. On the one hand, the gap between theorizing and empirical research points to the need to embed ourselves in a dialectical understanding of both spheres. On the other hand, the field carries the exciting and yet traumatizing effects of a dynamically changing landscape, rendering long-term analysis difficult. The public debate often becomes overly focused on the day-to-day developments and makes co-imbricated realities all the more complex. Having experienced this difficulty during my fieldwork within the Muslim communities in Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area, where I spent considerable time among six Muslim communities, I wanted my research in Los Angeles to focus more exclusively on the wider narratives that defined the public conversation on religion in Southern California.”