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Genealogy
Special Issues
Secularism, Multiculturalism and Race–Religion Entanglements
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Secularism, Multiculturalism and Race–Religion Entanglements

A special issue of Genealogy (ISSN 2313-5778).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (16 January 2026) | Viewed by 2252

Special Issue Editors

Dr. A. Sophie Lauwers

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Research in Political Philosophy and Ethics Leuven (RIPPLE), Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium
Interests: secularism; political philosophy; religious inequality; racism; Christian hegemony; islamophobia; nationalism; liberalism; multiculturalism; recognition; epistemic injustice; difference
Dr. Anya Topolski

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Ethics and Political Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies, Radboud University, 6525 HT Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Interests: racism; political philosophy; ethics; European identity and exclusion; gender; antisemitism and Islamophobia; political theology; Jewish thought; Arendt; Levinas; Judeo-Christianity; Zionism

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Genealogy welcomes articles that critically engage with the concepts of race, religion, secularism, and multiculturalism. It starts from the observation that Euro-American history has been characterized by white and Western Christian hegemony, in which religious and racial exclusion are entangled. Different forms of secularism and multiculturalism have (separately or combined) been proposed to challenge these forms of hegemony, and the injustices that result from them (Taylor 1994, 1998; Laborde 2017; Modood 2019). However, other scholars have argued that secularism and multiculturalism, particularly in their partnership with liberalism, reinforce and obscure structural inequalities (Asad 2003; Lentin and Titley 2011; Kahn and Lloyd 2016). Both secularism and multiculturalism have—despite their differences—received remarkably similar critiques of fostering essentialism, reifying majority–minority dynamics, and being vessels for state governmentality (Bhandar 2009; Amir-Moazami 2022). Critics of multiculturalist or secularist (normative) policies and theories, and those advocating for them, rarely enter into conversation. This special issue provides an interdisciplinary forum to bring these perspectives together. It invites analyses of the historical and contemporary entanglements of racial and religious exclusion, and of promising ways to address these patterns—whether by deploying, rethinking, resisting, or going beyond liberalism, secularism, or multiculturalism.

In line with this aim, we invite both theoretical and theoretically informed empirical papers from all disciplines and all geographical contexts.

Possible topics could include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Genealogical studies of the race–religion constellation in relation to regimes of secularism and/or multiculturalism.
  • The role of ‘religio-secularism’ in shaping racism.
  • Islamophobia, antisemitism, or antizyganism.
  • Political theological analyses of liberalism, secularism and/or multiculturalism.
  • Nationalism in relation to religion and race.
  • The nexus of modernity–coloniality–secularity.
  • Anti-racism activism in relation to secularism and/or multiculturalism.
  • Liberalism’s engagement with religion and race.
  • The politics of recognition.
  • Neutrality and/or equality as normative standards for racial or religious (in)justice.
  • The (dis)connections between state-led institutional programs, societal discourse, and political theories.
  • Tensions between ideal and non-ideal theory in secularist and multiculturalist theory.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400–600 words summarizing their intended contribution by May 1st 2025. Please send it to sophie.lauwers@kuleuven.be with the subject line “Submission Special Issue Genealogy”. Abstracts will be reviewed to ensure a fit within the scope of the Special Issue. We will then invite selected papers to be submitted as full manuscripts for peer review by December 1st 2025. Each article will be published in open access, on a rolling basis; fee waivers are available if an author’s funding does not cover the APC.

References

Amir-Moazami, Schirin. 2022. Interrogating Muslims: The Liberal-Secular Matrix of Integration. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Bhandar, Brenna. 2009. ‘The Ties That Bind: Multiculturalism and Secularism Reconsidered’. Journal of Law and Society 36 (3): 301–26. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6478.2009.00469.x.

Kahn, Jonathon Samuel, and Vincent W. Lloyd, eds. 2016. Race and Secularism in America. Religion, Culture, and Public Life. New York: Columbia University Press.

Laborde, Cécile. 2017. Liberalism’s Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lentin, Alana, and Gavan Titley. 2011. The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age. London New York: Zed Books.

Modood, Tariq. 2019. Essays on Secularism and Multiculturalism. Colchester: ECPR Press.

Taylor, Charles. 1994. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

———. 1998. ‘Modes of Secularism’. In Secularism and Its Critics, edited by Rajeev Bhargava, 31–53. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dr. A. Sophie Lauwers
Dr. Anya Topolski
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Genealogy is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • multiculturalism
  • secularism
  • liberalism
  • racism
  • religious inequality
  • Christian hegemony
  • race–religion constellation
  • governance
  • politics of difference

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Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies can be found here.

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

22 pages, 355 KB  
Article
Decolonial African Agency and Same-Sex Relations: Beyond the Religious-Secular Divide
by Josias Tembo
Genealogy 2026, 10(2), 68; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy10020068 - 1 Jun 2026
Viewed by 248
Abstract
In this article, I show how discourses of African tradition, human rights, and African indigeneity circumscribe and curtail the emancipatory potential of discussions of same-sex relations in Africa. The terms of the debate on both sides—those who claim that same-sex relations are ‘un-African’ [...] Read more.
In this article, I show how discourses of African tradition, human rights, and African indigeneity circumscribe and curtail the emancipatory potential of discussions of same-sex relations in Africa. The terms of the debate on both sides—those who claim that same-sex relations are ‘un-African’ and the critics who rightly challenge this view—are circumscribed by what I call the religious-secular divide. This divide continues to entrap discussions of African humanity and agency within racial-colonial strictures of tradition/religion and secularity/modernity. Instead, by engaging with the work of Amilcar Cabral and Aimé Césaire, I develop a notion of decolonial or emancipatory African agency and a way of understanding African humanity as an alternative basis for engaging with the question of same-sex relations in Africa, African traditions, and African indigeneity, and with questions of African humanity and decolonial agency more generally. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Secularism, Multiculturalism and Race–Religion Entanglements)
15 pages, 241 KB  
Article
Plurality of the Secular: Uncovering African Forms of Secularity
by Donald Mark C. Ude
Genealogy 2026, 10(2), 64; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy10020064 - 29 May 2026
Viewed by 134
Abstract
The article argues that existing conceptualizations of secularity ought to be expanded to embrace a plurality of practices and forms of life within African societies. In other words, secularity must be understood as a plurality of historically situated forms of life rather than [...] Read more.
The article argues that existing conceptualizations of secularity ought to be expanded to embrace a plurality of practices and forms of life within African societies. In other words, secularity must be understood as a plurality of historically situated forms of life rather than a single Western conceptual template. Two interconnected objectives define the article. The first is to show shows how the concepts of “deprivatization,” “conditions of belief,” and “postsecularity,” drawn from José Casanova, Charles Taylor, and Jürgen Habermas respectively, may contribute to a pluralistic conception of secularity. The second is to furnish concrete instances of secular forms of life in African societies by exploring the Igbo socio-religious world, underlining its secularity. In foregrounding African forms of secularity, the article not only challenges Western hegemonic appropriation of the secular category and its implicit race-religion nexus, but also contributes to ongoing efforts to rethink, ‘decolonize,’ and deracialize secularity as a global category of social analysis. Ultimately, the future of secularity lies in ongoing, decentered contestations and conversations across multiple worlds. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Secularism, Multiculturalism and Race–Religion Entanglements)
14 pages, 265 KB  
Article
Islam, Modernity, and the ‘Problem-Case’ of Religion
by Nasar Meer
Genealogy 2026, 10(2), 62; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy10020062 - 26 May 2026
Viewed by 206
Abstract
This article examines how social science has recurrently positioned Islam as a problem-case for European narratives of modernity, simultaneously comparable as ‘a religion’ yet cast as the religion that ‘doesn’t fit’ secularisation, differentiation, and liberal public-reason expectations. Moving beyond the view that social [...] Read more.
This article examines how social science has recurrently positioned Islam as a problem-case for European narratives of modernity, simultaneously comparable as ‘a religion’ yet cast as the religion that ‘doesn’t fit’ secularisation, differentiation, and liberal public-reason expectations. Moving beyond the view that social science merely misdescribed Islam, this article argues that Islam has often been made to carry an explanatory burden internal to Europe’s self-narration, a limit-case through which stalled secularisation, anxious liberalism, and contested universals are rendered intelligible and governable. The article returns to canonical texts that helped establish such comparative imagination, including Hegel’s philosophy of history, Weber’s typologies of religious ‘bearers,’ and Gellner’s account of Islam as a comprehensive ‘blueprint’ of social order, to show how durable contrast effects were installed and later reactivated in contemporary debates on secularism, gender, security, and belonging. Drawing on Asad’s critique of the category ‘religion’, the article theorises ‘disruption’ as a recurring genre through which Islam is made exceptional, disruptive to secularisation theory, to accounts of modern differentiation, and to liberal self-understanding. It concludes by appealing to a reflexive sociology of religion that historicises its own categories, compares entanglements rather than civilisations, and treats Muslim intellectual traditions as theory-producing interlocutors rather than merely empirical ‘data’. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Secularism, Multiculturalism and Race–Religion Entanglements)
21 pages, 288 KB  
Article
In the Space Between Words: Speech–Silence Dynamics, Religio–Racial Formations, and Christian–Muslim Relationships in The Netherlands
by Deniz Aktaş
Genealogy 2026, 10(2), 43; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy10020043 - 10 Apr 2026
Viewed by 658
Abstract
In Western Europe, and particularly in The Netherlands, speech is rarely neutral: to talk is to participate morally and civically, while silence is frequently marked as evasive, passive, or suspect. The capacities for speech, for being heard, understood, and responsive, are widely regarded [...] Read more.
In Western Europe, and particularly in The Netherlands, speech is rarely neutral: to talk is to participate morally and civically, while silence is frequently marked as evasive, passive, or suspect. The capacities for speech, for being heard, understood, and responsive, are widely regarded as hallmarks of autonomous, transparent, free-thinking, and sovereign subjectivity, celebrated as expressions of a shared progressive modernity. These ideals of subjectivity are routinely placed in tension within the so-called secular–religious binary framework, in which the compatibility of non-secular sensibilities or non-Christian religions, especially Islam, with such Dutch societal values is persistently and heavily problematized. Within such accounts, speech becomes a criterion Muslims in Europe are then expected to meet, not merely by speaking but by doing so in ways deemed proper and intelligible. To complicate and deepen understanding of these dynamics, this article draws on ethnographic insights from (secular) Christian–Muslim couples in The Netherlands, looking at how the dynamics of speech–silence function within intimate contexts, where they take place, where they break down, and ultimately where their limits lie. Attuned to the cacophony of multivocal gestures, whether in acts of refusal, the quiet eloquence of silence, or the directness of vocal protest, the article reveals the intricate and consequential interplay between these dynamics and the structuring and affective forms of secular and religio-racial norms in everyday life. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Secularism, Multiculturalism and Race–Religion Entanglements)
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