Paper short abstract:

The contribution analyses focus group discussions with schoolchildren and youth about religious diversity in Switzerland. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the participants' strategies to manage diversity in the school class.

Paper long abstract:

Experiencing diversity and mutuality is the normal course of life in Swiss schools. In focus group discussions, nine to sixteen year-old schoolchildren employ a wide spectrum of constructions of insiders and outsiders. This is best illustrated by the participants' own questions: Who is ascribed as a foreigner in Switzerland? Do only people from the Balkans conform to this category, while an Italian classmate does not? Would it be easier to just call oneself a human being or a European instead of specifying one's nationality or religious belonging? What is there about gender stereotypes within the category of Muslims: are all boys violent and all girls victims? And who is a "true" Muslim anyway? Is it different to live as a Hindu in urban and rural areas? The heterogeneity of focus groups regarding religion, ethnicity or gender seems to be crucial for the participants' categorisations of mutuality and diversity, as well as for their strategies of alliance building and dealing with dominance or subordination. To demonstrate how children and youth embody religion and belief in schools, we propose to put the intersections of religion with other categories of difference into context. Given the increasing significance of identity politics in the public domain, it should be the task of social science research to highlight the multiple dimensions of belonging employed by children and youth. This perspective may help to prevent hasty policies that consider only one notion of difference such as religion, ethnicity or gender.

Paper short abstract:

The objective of this paper is to examine how various educational approaches in Russia tackle this national concern over the weakening civil society, with the ‘Orthodox culture’ concept and it's integration into curriculum serving as bridge between secular and religious spheres.

Paper long abstract:

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, there has been a concerted effort by both the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church to institute K-12 classes such as the Foundations of New Orthodox Culture, which familiarizes students with religious themes found in Russian history and culture. This trend in Russian education, centered on proper moral upbringing of Russia's youth, simultaneously serves the state's interest of increasing civic engagement and solidifying Orthodox hegemony. Rather than interpreting this trend as 'secularizing religion', the Church Patriarchy would insist that they are correctly reapplying humanism back into education and argue against drawing a rigid line between the secular and religious. Opponents to this view are in a precarious position of being charged of continuing the Soviet tradition of scientific atheism, a pedagogical approach that has been presented as inciting an 'anti-culture', "a culture in opposition to God, becoming anti-religious and anti-humane" (Willems 2007). Understanding the repercussions and potential conflicts of Orthodoxy's increased presence in education is essential, particularly in a country of multiethnic and multi-denominational populations. Public schools are becoming an emerging arena for building and articulating national conceptions of morality as well as a place to emphasize the role of communities in a child's upbringing, no longer seen as a private family affair. The objective of this paper is to examine how various educational approaches tackle this national concern over the weakening civil society, with the 'Orthodox culture' concept serving as bridge between secular and religious spheres.

Paper short abstract:

The paper analyses the situation of children of Jehovah's Witnesses under the socialist regime and at present in Saxony, Eastern Germany. I argue that religious socialisation proved more effective than GDR's efforts to develop a "new socialist personality" - thus, ensuring the movement's survival.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses a vital problem for many religious movements: to keep conversion rates growing and to retain member's children. This issue is analysed in a rather unusual setting of the former German Democratic Republic, which is considered the most secularised country in Europe. For forty years of the socialist regime, many religious groups were banned and their members suffered surveillance and prosecutions. Jehovah's Witnesses, banned from 1950-1990, managed to retain the numbers of its members during the GDR. After 1990, the number of members significantly increased. I would argue that the socialisation model of the Society certainly contributed to the survival of the movement during the socialist regime.

In the GDR, Witness children were caught up in an educational discourse that perceived the educational process not only as an instrument of transmitting knowledge but first and foremost, the instrument of socialist upbringing. One of the goals of this ideological education was the morality of the "new socialist personality", a mixture of patriotism, humanism, collectivism and responsibility to the Party. Owing their primarily loyalty to God, Witness children did not participate in any mass organisations. Therefore, they were considered by the state authorities as unable to develop a "socialist character" and were deprived of educational and professional chances. In the same process, however, their religious identity has been formed.

Paper long abstract:

In 1932, German missionary-anthropologist Bruno Gutmann published Die Stammeslehren der Dschagga, Tribal Lessons of the Chagga. The collection includes teachings from Chagga rituals of initiation, which themselves embed moral ideations of mutuality and diversity across generations. This presentation will describe and analyze Die Stammeslehren from three angles: that of Gutmann's missiological frame at a time when Tanganyika was transitioning form German to British colonial administration; that of Chagga conceptions of pedagogy and generationality at the time of the text's creation; and that of Chagga youth and elders living on Mount Kilimanjaro as conveyed through a local denominational Christian frame at the turn of the twenty-first century. I will use discussion of this last perspective as an occasion to reflect and comment on the articulation of intergenerational visions of mutuality/diversity with historical changes over time; and I will link these changes to ideations about the future that children and youth from Kilimanjaro express in connection with the global reaches of schooling and religion today.

Paper short abstract:

This study on "letters to the editor" that religious and secular Turkish youth send to newspapers addresses the semiotic and epistemic interface between youth and Islam in Turkish media and society.

Paper long abstract:

What is the relationship between sexual identities and religious consciousness among Turkish youth? The case I study—"letters to the editor" that religious and secular youth send to national newspapers — explores the writing strategies and interpretative conventions that enter into discussions about sex.

Once exclusively associated with adult society, newspapers, organs of information and public debate, have become a forum in which Turkish teenagers critically reflect upon collective identities. Two newspapers, one religious, the other secular, publish a weekly section "Letters to the editor," exclusively geared to the youth. The letters, which straddle several genres - the confessional conversation, the social critique, and the didactic homily, provide an outlet for young men and women to explore and discuss intimate topics. Most letters center on contemporary forms of sexuality and sexual relations and their compatibility - or lack of - with Islamic ways of life. My discussion of these letters will draw out three interrelated issues: newspapers as an environment of situated learning; letter-writing as a socially mediated textual performance which provide Turkish youth agency, especially participation in public debates; and the ongoing centrality of religion in personal issues. All three issues open up a series of crucial questions for investigating how young people perceive themselves as active creators and subjects of society.

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines ways in which young British-born South Asian Muslim women engage with Islam in various sites: on-line discussions, study circles, conferences, and Islamic concerts. I argue that the spaces in which these young women participate allow them to gain much knowledge about Islam.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the ways in which young, British-born South Asian Muslim women engage with Islam in various sites such as on-line discussion threads, study circles, conferences, workshops, and nasheed concerts. I show how young women acquire knowledge of Islam in their everyday actions as participants in virtual and religious spaces and in social networks formed through these social arenas. Contrary to mainstream views that Islam is exclusively socialized within domestic spheres, I argue that these social spaces afford young women much knowledge of Islam, as they collectively search to comprehend Islam in Britain.

While traditional anthropology has given much attention to the ways in which religion and religious rituals are passed across generations through family and kin ties, the young women in my study actively sought to engage with Islam in various spaces away from their homes and outside the bounds of family relations. Here, they influenced each others' interpretations of Islam. Examining some of these religious and virtual spaces, the paper demonstrates that these are not simply sites where young women perform religious rituals. Rather, they are sites where young women both discover and establish their own ways of interpreting Islam within contemporary British society. The paper is based on virtual fieldwork in an on-line discussion thread as well as participant observation and interviews with twenty-five young British Muslim women in mosques in two cities in Northern England.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the intergenerational modalities and moralities children encounter in a Danish Jewish day school. It argues that the school's efforts to 'regenerate' Jewish affiliation among pupils is tempered by a plurality of intergenerational exchanges and claims to a Jewish identity.

Paper long abstract:

Parents often enroll their children in faith-based schools to ensure a desired inculcation of religious teachings and traditions, thought to facilitate the child's personal religious stance and affiliation with a religious community. Many studies of religious socialization reproduce this linear logic by focusing on processes and practices of religious enculturation and embodiment aimed at placing and keeping children 'within the folds' of their parents' moral and religious communities. Such studies tend to represent faith-based communities as monolithic agents of social reproduction working to ensure cultural continuity, social replacement and group survival.

Drawing on the ethnography of a day school run by the Jewish Community in Denmark, this paper explores the multifaceted intergenerational modalities and moralities of remembrance that children encounter in this setting. It argues that the school's pedagogical effort to 'regenerate' a Jewish affiliation among pupils is tempered by a plurality of intergenerational exchanges and diverse claims to acceptable Jewish identity by various segments of the community. Thus, although the moral education of Jewish children involves cultivating institutionalized exchanges with a deity, forefathers, religious prescriptions and traditions, it also involves learning to distinguish subtle, yet forceful categorical differences in religiosity. Keeping children 'within the fold' of this small faith-based community entails inculcating the moral capacity to engage as cultural intimates across conflicting factions and diverse identities.

Paper short abstract:

A study of how children and adults together constituted the distinctive shape of modern Catholicism in the US.

Paper long abstract:

Scholars of childhood have focused over the past several decades on the things that children themselves do and make in their worlds, a correction of earlier tendencies to view children through the lens of adult practice. But children and adults together make the world that together they inhabit. Relationships between adults and children take many forms, in various settings, with different consequences; the precise shape of these bonds is a matter for cultural analysis.

This paper examines relationships among children, their adult kin, and vowed adult religious (priests, nuns, and brothers) in U.S. Catholicism, from 1925 (when immigration from Europe ended by law) and 1975 (the close of the period of reform associated with Vatican II). There were three overlapping generations of children in these years (the immigrant generation, 1925-1940; the children of the war years; and the children of the 1960s and 1970s, in the changing church and nation). Each was faced with distinct challenges; in each, relational patterns were established that had great consequences for the shape of American Catholicism broadly. Catholic adults and children together worked through the religious and civic challenges that arose on shifting social grounds; together Catholic children and adults made their way into the American public sphere, in years that saw several outbursts of anti-Catholicism in the United States, amid the steady movement of the immigrants' children and grandchildren into the middle class. Children and adults together evolved new religious forms for changing times. 20th Century U.S. Catholicism is the product of these relationships.