The ‘secular’, the ‘religious’, and the ‘refugee’ in Germany

Ever since the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015, the ‘refugee’ in Germany has been constructed in a variety of ways that are implicated in specific co-constitutive notions of the ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ that exert symbolic power by naturalizing certain notions of the religious and thereby the secular while excluding others and feeding back into the subject formation (or subjectivation) of people classified as ‘refugees’. In this process certain positions are produced as hegemonic while others are classified as not acceptable (e.g., “radical”, “not European” or “anti-humanist”). This in turn feeds into the on-going institutionalization of Islam in Germany. In this podcast, Chris speaks with Carmen Becker on this important topic, drawing upon her critically engaged ongoing fieldwork among Syrian forced migrants in the city of Hannover and an analysis of political measures, research designs and media productions that are part of the apparatus producing the ‘refugee’. This interview was recorded at the European Association for the Study of Religions’ 2018 conference on Multiple Religious Identities in Bern, Switzerland. It also make specific reference to the documentary series “Marhaba – Ankommen in Deutschland” – particularly the episode “Liebe und Sex”.