Research structure
The bulk of the research at the Cluster of Excellence is carried out within a framework of individual research projects, each of which contribute to, and co-operate with others in the investigation of the Cluster’s overarching research questions. These questions are themselves divided into three research fields: transcultural entanglements and disentanglements, religious diversity and legal-political unity, and criticism of religion and apologetics. Running across and uniting these fields of research are theory platforms, where researchers work with theories of conflict, emotionality and mediality, as well as of social inequality and differentiation. In addition, there are flexible Research Clouds dealing with overarching themes such as Memory and Forgetting, Migration and Diaspora, Epidemics, or Religious Landscapes and Environmental Devotion.
Not least among the aims of research in the Cluster is to foster an analytical distance from some questions currently perceived as urgent, and thereby avoid presenting simplistic explanations of contemporary problems. For that reason, the Centre for Research Communication disseminates research from the humanities and social sciences to a wide range of target groups in society – including sociological findings on migration in Europe, philosophical reflections on biopolitics, legal analyses of religious constitutional law or historical studies of the relationship between religion, violence and gender.
In order to promote early-career researchers and to unite research and teaching, the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” runs a Graduate School with an interdisciplinary doctoral programme. Postdocs are involved in interdisciplinary research with autonomous projects.