W sekcji Blog/Varia publikujemy akualności dotyczące projektu, takie jak informacje dotyczące konferencji, warsztatów, informacje o naszych publikacjach i organizowanych przez nas wydarzeniach, ciekawostki. Jest to także miejsce, w którym pojawiają się krótkie notki przygotowywane przez współpracujących z nami studentów.  

On 7-8 of April we took part in Reenchanting. New Approaches in Eastern and Central Europe conference in Budapest. Natalia Zawiejska and Ann Maćkowiak from our team presented on: What is specific about urbanity and formations of religion in CEE? Case of Polish cities.

 

Short abstract:

According to several sociological and anthropological approaches focusing on the urbanity and religion nexus, urbanities might be considered principal spatialities of contemporary religious re-enchantment (Molendijk, Beaumont and Baker 2011; Beaumont and Cloke 2012; Stringer 2013; Burchardt, Becci and Casanova 2013; Garbin and Strhan 2017; Berking, Steets and Schwenk 2018; Cloke, Baker, Sutherland and Williams 2019). By urbanity we mean complex consisting of urban materiality, urban social processes and practices, and the lived experience of the city dwellers (see Rau 2020). Triggering the comeback of religion in what was several decades ago framed as “the secular city”, urbanities are considered principal tools giving shape to contemporary formations of religion. Most theories dealing with the postsecular turn in urban studies as well as these examining religion as an important dimension of urban imaginary, urban processes and urban lives, are rooted in Western experience or focused on Global South epistemologies. There is a visible lack of epistemic models that consider the specificity of Central East Europe’s historic and social experience to characterise urbanity and religion nexus, that, as we claim, is crucial in framing the current ontological status of “religion” in the CEE.
Therefore, following Martin Müller (2020), we ask if it is possible to “think with the Global East” to elaborate on contemporary religious dynamic in such CEE spaces as Polish cities. In our paper, we intend to present findings of our ongoing research project. We investigate Polish cities withithe RUM – Religion Urbanity Mapping project (https://rum.project.uj.edu.pl/en_GB/start). We focus on three dimensions that we consider crucial in contemporary “re-enchantment” or as we would rather call it “re-formation” of religious fields in contemporary Polish urbanities. We will show three different cases from our fieldwork representing the relation between economy and religion, protest movements and religion, and religion and creativity.