Religions in Diaspora and Global Affairs

Living in a Critical Condition

UC Riverside Recipients

Multi-campus RIDAGA Humanities Studio awards have been granted by UCHRI to Jennifer Hughes (Associate Professor, History) for her project, “Global Religious Festivals in Secular Cityscapes: Immigration, Politics and Religious Performance in California,” and to Mariam Lam (Associate Professor, Comparative Literature) for “Humanitarian Ethics, Religious Affinities, and the Politics of Dissent.” Both $75,000 awards are administered through the Center for Ideas and Society.

Project Description

“The UC Humanities Research Institute, funded by a $500,000 grant from the Henry R. Luce Foundation, has embarked on a three-year research initiative exploring the complex cultural and political relations between diasporic religious communities and their self-identified homelands. The initiative is funded by the Luce Foundation’s Initiative on Religion and International Affairs, a grant program that seeks to deepen understanding of religion as a critical but often neglected dimension of national and international policies and politics.

“Over the past few decades, globalization and immigration have dramatically changed the religious landscape of the United States overall, and California in particular,” said UCHRI director David Theo Goldberg. “The UC system boasts impressive research strengths in religious studies as well as transnationalism, migration and diaspora studies, ethnic and gender studies, and international politics,” Goldberg noted. “This initiative will bring these scholars together and support innovative research and outreach on these critical issues.”

The Religions in Diaspora and Global Affairs (RIDAGA) project funds a one-year working group of UC faculty, international scholars, journalists, and policy organizations followed by a two-year Humanities Studio that will support three large-scale multicampus research groups. Committed to research discovery on a focal theme or topic, the Humanities Studio brings innovative research, pedagogy, and public applications into interactive and interdisciplinary collaborative production.”

[text from UCHRI RIDAGA project site, author Kelly Brown http://ridaga.uchri.org/about/ ]

Past Events

2015 RIDAGA Symposium – October 2, 2015
➤ View photo & video gallery