The project Beyond Sacred/Secular Cities is devoted to exploring ‘the city’ as a stage for the construction and contest of nationalist imaginations in the Middle East (and beyond). It aims at unpacking how nationalism, in various national contexts and urban localities, comprises entangled and ambiguous religious/secular imaginaries, providing critical perspectives on conventional dichotomies of the ‘sacred’ versus ‘profane’ and ‘traditional’ versus the ‘modern’ – and how cities charged with symbolic significance tend to be regarded as carriers of such characteristics and legacies.
The project comprises two main components. An empirical study will be conducted in/of four cities conventionally associated with such bifurcated imaginaries: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Istanbul, and Izmir. The study will contextually and comparatively explore local-urban memory institutions in the four cities (focusing on museums and public commemorative spaces), in relation to local and national debates on ‘nationalist values’, aesthetic legacies, and the commemoration of historical/ritual fixtures.
The project’s second component consists of the creation of the multi-disciplinary research platform ‘City/Religion/Nationalism’, as a forum for theoretical development and comparative perspectives on religion, secularity, and nationalism in urban contexts. Through its seminar series and workshops, engaging national and international expertise, the project aims at creating an international hub for research on cities, religion, and nationalism at Lund University, co-hosted by the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies and the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies
Research Team
Torsten Janson, Islamology (Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, Lund University)
Jayne Svenungsson, Systematic Theology (Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, Lund University)
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, Eastern and Central European Studies (Center for Languages and Literature, Lund Univerisity)
Mattias Kärrholm, Architectural Theory (Department of Architecture and Built Environment, Lund University)