Peripheral Religiosities

The project aims to examine the relationship between religion, stigmatised urban peripheries, and social distress. We want to compare two types of religious organisations—Muslim and Pentecostal—in two neighbourhoods in Catalonia: Espronceda in Sabadell and Plaça Catalunya in Salt (and the area bordering it, Santa Eugènia in Girona). The research project is organised around three questions. The first is: are these economic and social peripheries spaces that receive new populations and where resources are allocated—resources belonging to the religious field, but also to the social, cultural, labour, or housing spheres?

The objective is to understand the role religion plays in facing the material, cultural, and symbolic precarity that residents of these peripheries may encounter, especially those who have undergone a migration process. The second question reflects on the role of religious organisations and expressions in the interpretation and social channelling of collective distress. This issue connects with a growing international scientific literature on rising conflict in peripheral neighbourhoods of London or Paris and the widely discussed trends toward the radicalisation of young residents of these stigmatised suburbs.

The final question is related to how traditional popular movements linked to urban struggles are articulated with new religious movements; it seeks to investigate whether these collective interactions take the form of cooperation, animosity, or functional replacement of the former by the latter. The research is framed within an emerging body of literature that emphasises the importance of understanding the production of urban space and processes of stigmatisation (territorial as well as ethnic or religious) when managing inequality and when seeking to understand expressions of distress, institutional disengagement, or public contestation among populations in certain marginalised and/or stigmatised neighbourhoods.

Project details

The current project, “Peripheral Religiosities. A comparative analysis of religious forms of channelling social distress in stigmatised neighbourhoods of Sabadell and Salt,” has as principal investigators Dr. Miquel Fernández and Manuel Delgado from the GRECS-UB group.

The project is funded by the Government of Catalonia (Generalitat de Catalunya) through the line of research grants on religious diversity.