Geographies of Postsecularity : Re-envisioning Politics, Subjectivity and Ethics

This book offers new insights on the concept of postsecularity and the associated idea of the postsecular city and public sphere. It provides a detailed account of how emergent postsecularity co-produces key spaces and subjectivities in contemporary urban life, as well as addressing criticisms levelled towards the concept of the postsecular. Though innovative empirical accounts, this book offers an in-depth examination of the ‘who’ and the ‘what’ that are created by the conditions of postsecularity. The book explores essential preconditions for the spaces and subjectivities of postsecular partnership, such as shared citizenship, tolerance, reflexive transformation and crossover narratives.

This book explores the hopeful possibility that emerging geographies of postsecularity are able to contribute significantly to the understanding of how common life may be shared, and how caring for the common goods of social justice, well-being, equality, solidarity and respect for difference may be imagined and practiced. Drawing on recent geographic theory to recalibrate ideas of the postsecular public sphere, the authors develop the case for postsecularity as a condition of being that is characterised by practices of receptive generosity, rapprochement between religious and secular ethics, and a hopeful re-enchantment and re-shaping of desire towards common life. The authors highlight the contested formation of ethical subjectivity under neoliberalism and the emergence of postsecularity within this process as an ethically-attuned politics which changes relations between religion and secularity and animates novel, hopeful imaginations, subjectivities, and praxes as alternatives to neoliberal norms. The spaces and subjectivities of emergent postsecularity are examined through a series of innovative case studies, including food banks, drug and alcohol treatment, refugee humanitarian activism in Calais, homeless participatory art projects, community responses to the Christchurch earthquakes in New Zealand, amongst others. The book also traces the global conditions for postsecularity beyond the Western and predominantly Christian-secular nexus of engagement.

This is a valuable resource for students in several academic disciplines, including geography, sociology, politics, religious studies, international development and anthropology. It will be of great interest to secular and faith-based practitioners working in religion, spirituality, politics or more widely in public policy, urban planning and community development.