Postsecular Feminisms explores the contested relationship between feminism and secularism through a series of case studies, featuring perspectives from the global North and South. It offers insights beyond those of the Abrahamic traditions, and includes multiple examples from South Asia. By decentering the European experience, Postsecular Feminisms shows how secularism and feminism have been constituted in North America, South Asia, and Anglophone West Africa. The book asks: can postsecular feminism offer a way to think about religion and gender so as to support women in all the variety of their lived experiences? The contributors show that postsecular feminism is a variety of feminism that is not necessarily either secularist or anti-secular. Rather it is feminism informed by a history of secularist bias within liberal feminism. Postsecular Feminisms explores both the potentials and pitfalls of postsecular feminisms, with some authors arguing that a contextually grounded praxis is possible, while others make a strong case against postsecular feminism as theory and practice.

Sojourner Truth and Intersectionality investigates how the story of the 19th-century abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Sojourner Truth has come to be an iconic feminist story, and explores the continued relevance of this story for contemporary feminist debates in general, and intersectionality scholarship in particular. Tracing various academic reception histories of the story of Sojourner Truth and the famous "Ain’t I a Woman?" speech, the book gives insight into how this story has been taken up by feminist scholars in different times, places, and political contexts. Exploring in particular how and why the story of Sojourner Truth has become a key reference for the theoretical and political framework of intersectionality, the book examines what the consequences of this connection are both for how intersectionality is understood today, and how the story of Sojourner Truth is approached. The book examines key intersecting dimensions within the story of Truth and its reception, including gender, race, class and religion. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in gender, women’s and feminist studies. In particular, the book will be of interest to those wishing to learn more about intersectionality and Sojourner Truth.

In 'Feminist Trouble', Éléonore Lépinard draws on extended fieldwork with numerous women's organizations in France and Quebec. Giving voice to devout women and women of colour, Lépinard dissects hierarchies of privilege in feminist politics, grappling with Islam and Islamic veiling debates to understand how these changes have transformed contemporary feminist movements, intersectional politics, and the feminist collective subject.

In his recent writings on religion and secularization, Habermas has challenged reason to clarify its relation to religious experience and to engage religions in a constructive dialogue. Given the global challenges facing humanity, nothing is more dangerous than the refusal to communicate that we encounter today in different forms of religious and ideological fundamentalism. Habermas argues that in order to engage in this dialogue, two conditions must be met: religion must accept the authority of secular reason as the fallible results of the sciences and the universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality; and conversely, secular reason must not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith. This argument was developed in part as a reaction to the conception of the relation between faith and reason formulated by Pope Benedict XVI in his 2006 Regensburg address. In 2007 Habermas conducted a debate, under the title ‘An Awareness of What Is Missing', with philosophers from the Jesuit School for Philosophy in Munich. This volume includes Habermas's essay, the contributions of his interlocutors and Habermas's reply to them. It will be indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand one of the most urgent and intractable issues of our time.

This book provides a conceptual, historical and contemporary context to the relationships between gender, religion and cities. It draws together these three components to provide an innovative view of how religion and gender interact and affect urban form and city planning. While there have been many books that deal with religion and cities; gender and cities; and gender and religion, this book is unique in bringing these three subjects together. This trio of inter-relationships is first explored within Western Christianity: in Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy and in the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements. A wider perspective is then provided in chapters on the ways in which Islam shapes urban development and influences the position of Muslim women in urban space. While official religions have declined in the West there is still a desire for new forms of spirituality, and this is discussed in chapters on municipal spirituality and on the rise of paganism and the links to both environmentalism and feminism. Finally, ways of taking into account both gender and religion within the statutory urban planning system are presented. This book will be of great interest to those researching environment and gender, urban planning and sustainability, human geography and religion.

Although demographically a minority in Kerala, India, Syrian Christians are not a subordinated community. They are caste-, race-, and class-privileged, and have long benefitted, both economically and socially, from their privileged position. Focusing on Syrian Christian women, Sonja Thomas explores how this community illuminates larger questions of multiple oppressions, privilege and subordination, racialization, and religion and secularism in India. In Privileged Minorities, Thomas examines a wide range of sources, including oral histories, ethnographic interviews, and legislative assembly debates, to interrogate the relationships between religious rights and women’s rights in Kerala. Using an intersectional approach, and US women of color feminist theory, she demonstrates the ways that race, caste, gender, religion, and politics are inextricably intertwined, with power and privilege working in complex and nuanced ways. By attending to the ways in which inequalities within groups shape very different experiences of religious and political movements in feminist and rights-based activism, Thomas lays the groundwork for imagining new feminist solidarities across religions, castes, races, and classes.

Workplace spirituality is an emerging field of study and practice and this book asks the questions: Where have we been in the last ten years as a field and where should we be headed in the next ten years? The editors asked these questions of thought leaders from around the globe, leaders who represent different sectors, faith traditions, worldviews and organizational functions. This volume represents the best of current thinking about the state of the field of workplace spirituality and of what the future holds. There are four themes: (1) management themes such as leadership, ethics, change management, and diversity; (2) workplace spirituality in sectors such as health and wellbeing, policing and creative industries, (3) key issues that are emerging, such as self-spirituality, mindfulness, storytelling and the importance of nature, and (4) cutting edge epistemologies and methodologies including indigenous studies, relational ontology, ethnography, and psychodynamics. These articles were chosen to provoke new thinking, new research, and new practice in the field of workplace spirituality, with the goal of helping the field mature in the next decade.

This is a collection of eleven chapters and an introduction that develop key arguments in decolonial feminism, particularly, the coloniality of gender, the critique of white and Eurocentric feminisms, the imbrication between gender, race, and colonialism, feminicides, and the coloniality of democracy and public institutions. The introduction addresses the path of decolonial feminism: from a new approach to understanding the relationship between gender as a category, race, and colonialism that combined U.S. Third World feminism and scholarship on coloniality and decoloniality to its exponential growth in the hands of activists and engaged scholars from Latin America and the Caribbean. Today, much of the literature on decolonial feminism in Latin America and the Caribbean remains unknown in the U.S. This anthology seeks to start remedying this problem with seven translations of work originally written in Spanish, and three essays originally written in English that address the fundamental concepts of decolonial feminism as well as its contributions to important contemporary political and intellectual debates.

In this ambitious new book, Henrietta Moore draws on anthropology, feminism and psychoanalysis to develop an original and provocative theory of gender and of how we become sexed beings. Arguing that the Oedipus complex is no longer the fulcrum of debate between anthropology and psychoanalysis, she demonstrates how recent theorizing on subjectivity, agency and culture has opened up new possibilities for rethinking the relationship between gender, sexuality and symbolism. Using detailed ethnographic material from Africa and Melanesia to explore the strengths and weaknesses of a range of theories in anthropology, feminism and psychoanalysis, Moore advocates an ethics of engagement based on a detailed understanding of the differences and similarities in the ways in which local communities and western scholars have imaginatively deployed the power of sexual difference. She demonstrates the importance of ethnographic listening, of focused attention to people’s imaginations, and of how this illuminates different facets of complex theoretical issues and human conundrums. Written not just for professional scholars and for students but for anyone with a serious interest in how gender and sexuality are conceptualized and experienced, this book is the most powerful and persuasive assessment to date of what anthropology has to contribute to these debates now and in the future.

Rosi Braidotti's nomadic theory outlines a sustainable modern subjectivity as one in flux, never opposed to a dominant hierarchy yet intrinsically other, always in the process of becoming, and perpetually engaged in dynamic power relations both creative and restrictive. Nomadic theory offers an original and powerful alternative for scholars working in cultural and social criticism and has, over the past decade, crept into continental philosophy, queer theory, and feminist, postcolonial, techno-science, media, and race studies, as well as into architecture, history, and anthropology. This collection provides a core introduction to Braidotti's nomadic theory and its innovative formulations, which playfully engage with Deleuze, Foucault, Irigaray, and a host of political and cultural issues. Arranged thematically, essays begin with such concepts as sexual difference and embodied subjectivity and follow with explorations in technoscience, feminism, postsecular citizenship, and the politics of affirmation. Braidotti develops a distinctly positive critical theory that rejuvenates the experience of political scholarship. Inspired yet not confined by Deleuzian vitalism, with its commitment to the ontology of flows, networks, and dynamic transformations, she emphasizes affects, imagination, and creativity and the politics of radical immanence. Incorporating ideas from Nietzsche and Spinoza as well, Braidotti establishes a critical-theoretical framework equal parts critique and creation. Ever mindful of the perils of defining difference in terms of denigration and the related tendency to subordinate sexualized, racialized, and naturalized others, she explores the eco-philosophical implications of nomadic theory, feminism, and the irreducibility of sexual difference and sexuality. Her dialogue with technoscience is crucial to nomadic theory, which deterritorializes the established understanding of what counts as human, along with our relationship to animals, the environment, and changing notions of materialism. Keeping her distance from the near-obsessive focus on vulnerability, trauma, and melancholia in contemporary political thought, Braidotti promotes a politics of affirmation that has the potential to become its own generative life force.