Department of Religious Studies

This course focuses on the “spatial turn” and its implications for religious studies, cultural anthropology, cultural studies, and related disciplines. Our starting point is the idea that spaces and places are simultaneously material, imagined, and social. We will consider how that approach helps us understand particular spaces and the insights that thinking spatially provides. We will pay particular attention to the idea of sacred spaces and how they are constituted through discourse and practice. Our readings will focus on a range of theoretical perspectives and on a series of themes in the study of religion, space, and place. These themes include movement, globalization, diaspora, cityscapes, and cyberspace. The course readings engage with these themes from a variety of disciplinary perspectives ranging from human geography to history to postcolonial studies.

3 credits