Migration and Secularism: A Critical View of the Construction of Universal Liberal Values in the Europe of the Mediterranean Arc
19 March 2025. From 18:30 | Conference | English | Universitat de Girona
The Middle East today is undergoing significant transformations in response to settler colonialism and authoritarianism, which can lead to both positive and negative developments. These include the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the fall of a brutal Syrian dictator, mass refugee movements, and public debates on religion, secularism, gender diversity, social justice, human rights, and democracy. This talk focuses on how migration challenges our conception of certain aspects of hardline secularism in the Northern and Southern Mediterranean and introduces a more multicultural version of secularism.
In this regard, this talk analyses how France is currently dealing with the “Muslim problem” and how citizens who refuse to assimilate provide French society with a mirror in which to reflect on its own identity, societal problems, and its rigid conception of secularism. Thus, it proposes a more inclusive and multicultural secularism that is less divisive and that is both necessary and indispensable for each society.
A lecture by Sari Hanafi is Professor of Sociology, Director of the Centre for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies, and Chair of the Islamic Studies Programme at the American University of Beirut. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris and has served as a visiting fellow at many universities worldwide, such as the University of Bologna and the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. His research interests include the sociology of religion, the connection of moral philosophy to the social sciences, the sociology of (forced) migration applied to the Palestinian refugees, and the politics of scientific research. He has been Editor of Idafat: The Arab Journal of Sociology (2017-22) and President of the International Sociological Association (2018-23). In 2022 he became lifetime fellow of the British Academy. Some of his recent books are: Studying Islam in the Arab World: The Rupture Between Religion and the Social Sciences (ed., Routledge, 2024), and The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East(co-edited with A. Salvatore and K. Obuse, ed., Oxford University Press, 2020).
Within the Aula Mediterrània 2024-2025 series.
Co-organised with the Master’s Degree in Migratory Movements in the 21st Century: Concepts, Reality and Actions, UdG
Venue: Sala d’actes, Faculty of Education and Pedagogy (Plaça Sant Domènec, 9, Girona)
Listen to the podcast with Sari Hanafi produced by the Master’s Degree in Migratory Movements in the 21st Century: Concepts, Reality and Actions, UdG
Speakers
Sari Hanafi
Professor of Sociology American University of Beirut.
Òscar Prieto
Associate Professor, Department of Pedagogy UdGOrganised by
