Religion, Gender, Race, and Citizenship: Intersecting Barriers to Participation and Belonging

Dear Colleagues,

Religion is a source of meaning, agency, empowerment, and belonging for a majority of people around the world, yet religion is also entangled with barriers and limitations to participation and belonging, including harassment, discrimination, and persecution. On the one hand, social inequalities pertaining to gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality intersect with religion and produce barriers to people’s participation and belonging in the wider society. On the other hand, such barriers also exist within religious communities themselves, including when women and people who are minoritized due to their color and/or sexuality are denied equal status, rights, and participation within their own religious tradition. Recent scholarship has sought to explore ‘religious citizenship’, where citizenship is broadly understood not only as formal status, rights, and duties, but as ‘lived’ through everyday participation, belonging, and care (Van den Bogert, 2020; Laksana and Wood, 2019; Burchardt 2018; Chaplin, 2018; Van Klinken and Obadare, 2018; Trovão, 2017; Nyhagen and Halsaa, 2016; Nyhagen, 2015). However, more research is needed on the dynamic interplay between religious citizenship and intersecting social identities and structures in specific sociocultural contexts in the Global North and the Global South. Moreover, social–scientific studies of religion have only recently begun to engage with the concept of intersectionality, which addresses the co-existence of different axes of identity and inequality (e.g., gender, race, and sexuality) that may produce particularly persistent forms of inequality (Crenshaw, 1989; Collins, 1991). While the study of religion and gender (Aune and Nyhagen, 2016) is by now quite well established, there is a dearth of research that addresses the intersection of religion and gender with other forms of identities and inequalities, including race (Sing, 2015; Weber 2015; Smiet 2005; Äppelros, 2005) and sexuality (Page and Yip, 2020).     

This Special Issue seeks original empirical contributions that address the topic of religion and citizenship from an intersectional perspective and examine barriers to participation and belonging either within the context of religion itself (including institutional/organized forms of religion and religion as practiced/lived) or within the context of the overall society (e.g., how societal barriers may hinder the equal treatment and participation of different religions and/or religious people). Studies from a wide range of sociocultural contexts around the globe are welcome.

Dr. Line Nyhagen
Guest Editor

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• gender
• race
• religion
• citizenship
• participation
• belonging