Search Results (95)

Evangelical churches increasingly engage in transnational partnerships that shape spiritual identity and moral belonging across borders. This study investigates how such partnerships function not simply as organizational strategies but as lived spatial practices grounded in faith. Drawing on Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) of interviews with Canadian and Mexican participants in a long-term church-planting relationship, the article explores how theological commitments, emotional ties, and embodied rituals generate spatial meaning. Participants framed their engagement not through institutional goals, but through metaphors of family, covenant, and companionship, suggesting a grassroots geopolitics rooted in care, hospitality, and spiritual presence. The findings reveal that space is produced not only through ideology or policy, but through practices like shared meals, cross-cultural mentorship, and prayerful presence—acts that reconfigure belonging along theological and affective lines. The article introduces the concept of religeopolitics to describe this phenomenon, arguing that evangelical actors are not merely influenced by global geopolitics but actively create alternative spatial imaginaries through faith. Foregrounding religious subjectivity in spatial production, this article advances scholarship on lived religion and critical geopolitics, highlighting how spiritual communities shape geopolitical belonging through theological imagination, relational duration, and embodied moral practice. Full article

The transnationalism phenomenon is at the forefront of today’s globalized world. This ethnographic self-reconstruction recounts a personal story as a transnational. I reflect on my engagement in continuous transnational migration practices, and on how these have and continue to mediate my identity [re]construction and my development of conocimiento. These insights help not only contribute to the under-explored body of literature that has adopted a comparative stance in looking at transnationalism and education on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border, but also seek to promote conversation around the behaviors and cognitive benefits of those who engage in such ongoing migration practices and are immersed in educational settings. Full article

Grounded in frameworks of decoloniality and transnationalism, this study examines how organizational behaviors in education—particularly in teacher preparation—can shift to more inclusively serve transnational youth, challenging Eurocentric, nation-bound assumptions about pedagogy, belonging, and professional development. The present study aims to understand Mexican-origin returnees and transnational migrants who came back to Mexico to pursue English teacher preparation degrees in Guanajuato and Hidalgo after spending significant periods of time on either side of the Mexico-U.S. border. Our study aimed to recognize and describe the experiences that shaped their English teaching practices and professional commitments to teaching English as a foreign language. Using narrative inquiry within a longitudinal qualitative study of 28 Mexican-origin pre-service English teachers, our research was guided by frameworks of decoloniality and transnationalism. Our findings reveal that for participants, U.S.-based teaching approaches were recalled most often as the best compared to Mexican ones. Participants also reflected on how their experiences of learning and adapting to a new culture contributed to their professional identity and how their ability to adapt constituted a form of international-mindedness. We argue that through the comparison and adoption of multiple decolonial practices, teacher preparation programs can produce culturally responsive pedagogies that cross borders. By illustrating how teacher preparation programs can cultivate culturally responsive pedagogies that transcend national boundaries, the study highlights the potential of decolonial and transnational perspectives to transform organizational behavior at multiple levels of educational practice and policy. Full article

On 10 December 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) without a single dissenting vote. The term “human rights” coalesced rapidly and unexpectedly. Samuel Moyn, a leading intellectual historian of human rights, observes that people now view universal human rights as part of a set of “conventional and enduring truths.” To the contrary, he asserts that “it was all rather new at the time.” Although historical and philosophical roots exist for the notion of rights, the early twentieth century witnessed little “human rights” discourse. Thus, this paper illuminates two evolutions—one political and the other religious—that helped set the stage for the birth of human rights in the aftermath of World War II. Politically, the failure of the “Westphalian order” to prevent the unimaginable suffering of “total war” broadened transnationalism beyond the quest for a balance of power between sovereign nation-states. On the religious side, rights advocates adapted principles drawn from prior debates to the mid-twentieth-century context, thereby contributing to the development and widespread embrace of the concept of inherent human dignity and the corresponding notion of inviolable and universal “human rights.” Full article

Recent theories of citizenship call into question the dominance of ancestry (jus sanguinis) and territory (jus soli) as the primary criteria for membership in a polity. Debates around postnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism increasingly locate the legitimacy of citizenship in world-level models of rights that extend beyond the state. Yet national citizenship remains remarkably persistent, posing three interrelated puzzles for the sociology of citizenship: (1) How can rights-based and birth-based legitimations of citizenship be reconciled? (2) How can citizenship be conceptualized in non-national terms without eroding the state’s central role? (3) How can we account for the rise of multinational citizenship rights? Drawing on recent global shifts in nationality laws, this article offers a unified analytical framework to address these puzzles through the concept of modular citizenship, which inverts the conventional understanding: it is not the juridical category of citizenship that determines the scope of rights, but the enforceable rights themselves that determine the quantum of citizenship. Full article

Higher education has long been subject to feminist critique, contesting traditional practices, with calls for transformative pedagogies that empower marginalised students, address social injustices and promote gender equality. Despite this, most classrooms in Western European universities remain largely unchanged, with educators facing the difficulty of imagining and/or enacting decolonial futures within their curricula. However, some progress has been made, particularly the inclusion of transnational scholarship in syllabi and a turn to transformative pedagogies, which allow for alternative ways of interdisciplinary knowing to enter academia. In this paper, we examine this coming together of approaches which promote dialogue and personal reflection to restructure discussions on equality, gender and knowledge production in the ‘classroom’. Using a creative critical account of feminist ethnography conducted at a Western European university, we present and discuss two illustrative vignettes about cultural mapping and critical fabulation, considering how dissonant voices have challenged Western concepts, exemplifying transformative pedagogy working in tandem with transnational thought. Key insights from the study identify approaches for facilitation of more open and richer discussions to reshape staff and student perspectives of gender, equality and knowledge production. Full article

Research on religion and migration has often focused on institutions and belief systems, while overlooking how mediation links migrants, sacred objects, rituals, and religious imaginaries. This study advances mediation as a core analytic in religion–migration studies by examining the practices of ten Thai migrant students in South Korea through semi-structured interviews on Buddhist amulets, Hindu deity pendants, Catholic rosaries, merit-making, and the elevation of sacred objects. Guided by Meyer’s religion-as-mediation framework and Taylor’s concept of the social imaginary, the analysis shows that quotidian, embodied engagements with sacred objects mediate and materialize Thai Buddhist–Animist imaginaries in Korean settings, expanding, transnationalizing, and hybridizing them through encounters with the host environment. These practices not only sustain spiritual continuity, but also generate sacred transnational social spaces that bridge both the ontological divide between the human and the transcendent and the geographical divide between Thailand and Korea. Rather than being preserved through institutional affiliation, migrant religiosity is continually reconstituted through everyday embodied practices of mediation that render the sacred experientially real in the host society. By foregrounding mediation, this study offers a reconceptualization of migrant religion as an embodied, material, and world-making process—one through which migrants actively reimagine and inhabit sacred spaces across borders. Full article

The publication of the Puhui Canon began in 1943, was interrupted in 1955, and was ultimately completed in 1998, spanning three significant historical periods: the Chinese War of Resistance Against Japan, the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949), and the early years of the People’s Republic of China. Its production was shaped by nationalism, Asian Buddhist interactions, warfare, and diplomacy. As the first Chinese Buddhist canon to incorporate Pāli texts, it reflects the legacy of Sino-Sri Lankan Buddhist exchanges since the late Qing dynasty. The Puhui Canon exemplifies a Pan-Asian vision, seeking to bridge Northern (Mahāyāna) and Southern (Theravāda) Buddhist traditions across Asia. Full article

The Catholic Church in Denmark hosts several migrant communities, with the Polish-speaking group among the largest and most visible. Institutionally, Catholic priests from Poland serve as chaplains for migrant congregations, accompanying these mobilities and providing educational practices (e.g., family guidance, biblical teaching). This paper examines how perspectives on Catholic scriptural authority differ between the Church’s institutional representatives and its members, revealing tensions between biblical authority, social accommodation, and family values in a migratory setting. Based on 20 months of fieldwork in a Polish Catholic community in Copenhagen, this paper highlights the dynamic interplay of how Church members assess scriptural authority as evaluative engagement in their transnational lives in the Danish public sphere, illustrated through interconnected ethnographic excerpts. This article illustrates how scriptural engagement offers a productive lens to explore divergent notions of Polish Catholic diasporic life and the tensions between transnational religion, national belonging, and moral navigation. Full article

Intercultural sensitivity is crucial in today’s diverse society, and accurate assessment is key to developing effective intercultural programs in educational institutions and beyond. The Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) is widely used for this purpose, yet its applicability to transnational individuals—those navigating multiple cultural and social systems—remains underexplored. This gap is important to address given the interconnected nature of our global society, where individuals frequently move across borders. To address this issue, this conceptual paper critically examines the underlying assumptions of the IDI regarding culture and identity through three interrelated frameworks: transnationalism, relational ontology, and intersectionality. Drawing on existing literature on these frameworks and the IDI, our analysis highlights how integrating these perspectives into the IDI and, by extension, other intercultural assessment tools can more accurately capture the complex, fluid, and dynamic nature of transnational experiences. This integration also shifts the discourse on intercultural assessment from a focus on individual competence to an emphasis on shared responsibility in fostering equitable, relationally grounded intercultural spaces. Implications for future research and practice are also discussed. Full article

This article focuses on the life writing narratives of diasporic writers in Europe, such as the Italian writer of Somali descent Igiaba Scego, who, through her writing and public role, manages to create powerful interventions on issues of belonging, diversity, and creativity, contributing to a renewed understanding of gender knowledge and cultures of equalities in localized as well as global contexts. This article focuses on her role as a writer as well as a postcolonial intellectual, as she is not just a spokesperson for her community, nor simply a promotor of universal values, but someone who straddles complex positionalities in their location in imperial–colonial orders. We align ourselves with the notion of postcolonial intellectuals as those who speak truth to power on issues of cultural integration and gender equalities). In her autobiographical work titled La mia casa è dove sono, published in 2010, Scego draws a subjective map of different places inhabited by her family: Somalia, Italy, and Great Britain, contributing to the understanding of unbelonging and transnationalism through topics of migration, biculturalism, gender, race, and identity. Full article

The contemporary restructuring of religion and secularism demands a departure from conventional post-secular analyses that remain confined within the epistemic and institutional frameworks of the nation-state. This paper develops the concept of post-secular cosmopolitanization to theorize the dissolution of the secular–religious binary as a regulatory mechanism of power, revealing how religion and secularism are co-constituted through global entanglements that transcend national boundaries. Unlike dominant conceptions of post-secularism, which assumes the continued dominance of secular and national institutions despite religious resurgence, post-secular cosmopolitanization captures the ways in which transnational religious movements, digital religious networks, and global governance structures are reshaping religious authority, secular regulation, and political sovereignty. It is shown that this transformation leads to three major consequences: (1) the erosion of the nation-state’s regulatory monopoly over religious life as alternative religious and transnational actors emerge as influential governance entities; (2) the deterritorialization and fragmentation of religious authority, undermining traditional clerical and institutional hierarchies; and (3) the blurring of religious and secular domains, where global economic, legal, and political structures increasingly integrate religious actors, norms, and ethical frameworks. These developments signal a paradigmatic shift beyond the secularization thesis and dominant conceptions of post-secularism, necessitating a reconsideration of how power, governance, and religious authority function in a world no longer structured by the nation-state’s exclusive claim to sovereignty. By analyzing these entanglements, this paper provides a theoretical framework to understand the reconfiguration of global secular and religious orders, challenging entrenched assumptions about the trajectory of modernity. Full article

In this article, we discuss the results of two ethnographic case studies on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on a Sunni Muslim DITIB mosque community and an Indian Hindu temple community in Hesse, Germany, conducted in the context of the ReCoVirA research project. The two cases were selected to represent established and less established religious communities. We connect our research to the RSST-Approach to understand the proactive aspect of religious communities and the concept of the refiguration of religion to describe the impacts of the shift to the digital during the pandemic on religious communities. Cultural regrouping emerges as a framework for understanding the changes to the observed socio-religious milieu and diaspora communities during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Full article

Previous researchers developed a comprehensive typology for categorizing social entrepreneurship; however, their framework does not fully address some emerging forms. This paper offers a critical addition to their model by introducing the “transnational pragmatist”, a type of social entrepreneur with a grassroots background who creates a community-centric social enterprise in a foreign context. Through insights gained from interviews with social entrepreneurs, this paper identifies and defines the transnational pragmatist as a distinct category that fills a significant gap in Abebe’s framework. Our contribution broadens the typology to better capture smaller for-profit and nonprofit ventures operating transnationally, enhancing the model’s relevance for international social entrepreneurs from humble origins. Full article

This article for the first time examines the activities of transnational information campaigns initiated by young Shiʿa Muslims across European, Russian, and Armenian cities. These campaigns aim to disseminate knowledge about Imam Hussain and his mission to non-Shiʿa audiences. The campaigns serve as vivid examples of the struggles faced by Muslims in relatively hostile contexts as they seek integration and acceptance as law-abiding and peaceful citizens. They also represent new avenues of Islamic activism, focusing on dismantling stereotypes and correcting “misunderstandings” within host societies. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and an analysis of campaign handouts and social media content between 2018 and 2024, this study explores how campaigners adapt the narrative of the Karbala tragedy—widely regarded as the metahistorical cornerstone of Shiʿa identity—to make it accessible and relevant to external audiences. These strategies enable campaigners to engage with out-group communities, testing and refining effective methods for presenting this pivotal historical event. The findings reveal that, through this process, the Karbala narrative undergoes both content-based and linguistic modifications, while the concept of justice—central to the commemoration of this tragedy—is reinterpreted in new contexts. This research contributes to the understanding of transnational Islamic activism and highlights the importance of strategic communication in fostering intercultural dialogue and promoting mutual understanding in diverse societies. Full article