In this article, we explore comparatively how migrant minorities draw from their religious resources to carve out spaces of livelihood in three global cities – Kuala Lumpur, which includes Kajang, Johannesburg and London. We also examine the spatial regimes through which the state and its apparatuses seek to manage the migrants' presence and visibility or invisibility within these urban spaces. In particular, we focus on three of the most salient dimensions of migrants' religious place making – embodied performance, the spatial management of difference and belonging, and multiple embedding across networked spaces. Although these three dimensions intersect in dynamic, often tensile ways to constitute the fabric of the life world of migrant minorities, we separate them for heuristic purposes to highlight the richness and texture of religious place making.
Th is essay offers some theoretical and methodological reflections on how the study of religion might look if we were to assume that complexity, connectivity, and fluidity are preponderant features of our present age, without ignoring the strong countervailing global logics of segregation, surveillance, and control. After characterizing transnational, global, and diasporic modalities of religion in motion, the essay explores the strengths and weaknesses of the analytical tools of flows, landscapes, and networks in the study of mobility. I argue that by placing power front and center, the concept of networks provides a necessary corrective to hydraulic models of flows and spatial metaphors of landscapes. Th ese metaphors tend to overstate the pervasiveness of porous boundaries and movement or to privilege the hermeneutic and phenomenological dimensions of religious activity.
This introduction describes the evolution of the conceptual framework that guided the research and analysis of findings from an international research project bringing a multi‐sited and transnational perspective to the study of the religious lives of migrant minorities. The project began by identifying potential contributions that studies of religion, migration and diversity offered one another. To research these issues, the project members investigated the lives of migrants who identify themselves as Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, who live as minorities within three urban contexts, and whose different national regimes for governing migrant and religious diversity have been shaped historically by the British Empire (London, Johannesburg, Kajang‐Kuala Lumpur). The researchers employed a biographic method of investigation in order to examine how migrants organized their religious lives within individual, familial, communal, urban, national and transnational spheres. To understand the intertwining between migratory and religious aspects of the migrants' lives on each of these levels, the project members focused their analysis of the research findings in relation to three themes: migratory and spiritual journeys, sacred and secular place‐making, and the circulation of people, objects, practices, and faiths. The introduction highlights how each of the articles in this collection both reflect and contribute to this intellectual framing in order to understand the interplay between religion, migration, and diversity.
In addition to research and classes, physics students may choose to participate in informal physics teaching experiences; however, these programs are understudied as part of the physics student experience. We investigate university educators' (UEs) negotiation of physics identity after they participate in an informal program for K-12 students as part of the Science Theatre student group at Michigan State University. We hypothesize that that the UEs' science identity is reshaped by the interactions and experiences they have in these programs, especially an intensive week-long trip to the Upper Peninsula. Pre-and post-interviews were collected with Science Theatre participants who went on the spring break trip. In analyzing this data, we demonstrate the efficacy of using a Community of Practice framework to understand UEs' experiences as they negotiate their memberships in the outreach and scientific communities.
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