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Series Preface
- Helen Traill, University of Glasgow
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- Book:
- The Practice of Collective Escape
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 23 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 29 September 2023, pp viii-viii
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- Chapter
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Summary
Justice refers to a broad concern with fairness, equity, equality and respect. Just from the daily news, it is readily apparent how questions of justice or, in fact, the more obvious experiences of injustice shape our everyday lives. From global trade to our own personal consumption; living or dying through war and peace; access to education; relations in the workplace or home; how we experience life through a spectrum of identities; or the more-than-human entanglements that contextualize our environments, we need to conceptualize and analyze the intersections between spaces and practices of justice in order to formulate innovative and grounded interventions.
The Spaces and Practices of Justice book series aims to do so through cutting across scales to explore power, relations and society from the local through to international levels, recognizing that space is fundamental to understanding how (in)justice is relationally produced in, and through, different temporal and geographical contexts. It is also always practised, and a conceptual focus on these ‘doings and sayings’ (Shove, 2014) brings a sense of the everydayness of (in)justice but also allows for analysis of the broader contexts, logics and structures within which such experiences and relations are embedded (Jaeger-Erben and Offenberger, 2014; Herman, 2018).
three - Spaces of postsecular engagement in cities
- Edited by Justin Beaumont, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands, Paul Cloke, University of Exeter
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- Book:
- Faith-Based Organisations and Exclusion in European Cities
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 07 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 03 October 2012, pp 59-80
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
Postsecularism presents an opportunity – for a space in which religious and secular worldviews can co-exist and enter into dialogue (Gorski and Altinordu, 2008), a ‘rapprochement of ethical praxis’ (Cloke, 2011, p 381). In this chapter, we engage with postsecularism through the spatial lens of the city because we consider that a postsecular approach provides a useful set of tools for conceptualising the rich and diverse ground-level engagements occurring between religious and secular groups within the intensive urban environment.
We start by establishing our understanding of postsecularism before moving on to consider existing literatures on the postsecular city. The multi-scalar role of faith-based organisations (FBOs) in urban spaces, their mobility and their performativity, is essential to our later discussion of what we call a postsecular ethics. A key contention of this section is that faith remains central despite the diversity in FBO responses to the challenges posed by neoliberal policies. We then consider some of these reactions from FBOs, which highlight the multiple and dynamic natures of postsecular spaces of engagement.
In the second half of the chapter, we introduce empirical examples that allow us to open up the political and ethical scope of postsecularism. The central aim of these sections is to develop the idea of a postsecular ethics, a highly contextual concept enacted through a dialogue, which ensures a performed virtue ethics based on a recognition of an intersubjective community. In order to construct our argument, we introduce this through reference to an oft-quoted example of postsecular engagement, London Citizens; this case establishes a certain lens, which offers a very particular way of interpreting other FBO cases. We found the vociferous discourse of an alternative to the neoliberal hegemony extremely useful in positioning postsecularism within the postpolitical, ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) condition that we take as this current, neoliberal moment. Understanding postsecularism as offering a revival of debate grounds our conceptualisation of a postsecular ethics on collaboration, praxis and an intersubjective sense of identity. The other empirical examples – Exodus Amsterdam and the Christian Aid and Resources Foundation (CARF) – offer lived cases through which the preceding theoretical discussion is explored. In these ways the empirical material weaves through the chapter's exploration of the political and ethical promise of FBOs in urban spaces, through their creation of collaborative and connected communities.