Short Abstract

Religious buildings across Europe—churches, mosques, synagogues—shift from worship to new uses, shaping public space and social life. This panel explores how their visibility fosters cohesion or polarization, identity, and debates on belonging and sustainability.

Long Abstract

In urban as well as rural Europe church towers and monastery walls are still dominant features. However, nowadays these buildings are not always used for liturgical purposes: some are empty and ruined, others become hotels, private homes, or museums. Moreover, they are obviously not the only religious buildings visible in the public space: synagogues, mosques and other buildings associated with religion are also increasingly visible. But along with the population shifts and the changing role of religion, the role of religious architecture is also changing. How and for what are they used, built, taken care of or left to ruin? Most importantly though, what does their presence and visibility do to the social life? Does it produce rather social polarisation or the social cohesion and how?

We invite contributions from you to discuss the role of religious architecture in Europe: from deserted or privatised churches, through rebuilt and securitized synagogues, to new constructions of churches, mosques and other places of worship. We are interested in the agency of buildings, especially those that are visible in public spaces and that provoke debates and reflections on belonging and identity, but also other issues such as ecology or sustainability, justice and access. We want to go beyond the paradigms prevalent in the social sciences to date that treat religious buildings primarily as cultural heritage. Instead, we invite you to look at buildings as agentive relational phenomena and ask what their presence does to various forms of social life.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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