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Religion, race and social justice

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posted on 2023-06-09, 15:38 authored by Aleksandra LewickiAleksandra Lewicki
Currently prevalent liberal democratic discourses and policies assume a lack of or failed ‘integration’ of racialized populations in Europe. While mainstream discourses framing approaches to diversity management, such as civic universalism or multiculturalism, differ regarding of who they consider responsible for addressing the ‘disintegration’ of, for instance, Muslim populations, and the kinds of regulatory responses they advocate, they all suggest that religious minorities need to be transferred from the outside to the inside of a social entity. A diagnosis of a ‘being outside’ informs regulatory frameworks that seek ‘to integrate’ by either prohibiting or accommodating religious minority practices, by limiting or extending the freedom of religious expression, or by protecting from discrimination on grounds of markers of belonging. As I traced in greater detail elsewhere (Lewicki 2014), the disintegration diagnosis assumes an understanding of inequality as ‘individual status differential’, thus as lower position in a social hierarchy that is mainly understood as cultural. This understanding falls short of problematizing inequality as multidimensional and as structural, thus rooted within and brought about by various features of the social order. As an alternative perspective to the reductive ‘integration paradigm’, I propose to draw on a conceptualization of social justice that allows for a more encompassing analysis of structural asymmetries in relation to racialized alterity within diverse European societies. This perspective enables us to critically reflect on distinctions that are key features of and thus perpetually reproduced by the systemic logics and dynamics of the current social order, including the capitalist market economy, Christian secularity, or the nation state.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Published version

Publisher

Edward Elgar

Page range

447-457

Book title

Handbook on global social justice

Place of publication

Cheltenham

ISBN

9781786431417

Department affiliated with

  • Sociology and Criminology Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • No

Editors

Gary Craig

Legacy Posted Date

2018-11-16

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2018-11-16

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