Religions in Diaspora and Global Affairs (RIDAGA) is a three-year experiment in humanities collaboration focusing on issues surrounding several global religious diasporas funded by the Luce Foundation. The University of California Humanities Research Institute helped introduce possible collaborators from across the University of California to one another in a “Studio Jam” session that produced four “Humanities Studios” which are currently concluding their three-year, collaborative research projects.
Global Religious Festivals is one of the four Humanities Studios. The other studios are:
Shari’a Revoiced: Documenting American Muslims’ Experiences of Islamic Law is working to uncover new voices and understandings of Islamic law among Muslim communities in California. The studio documents how Muslim activists, students, feminists, lawyers, social workers, and other cultural brokers produce local forms of Islamic knowledge.
Humanitarian Ethics, Religious Affinities, and the Politics of Dissent investigates transnational faith-based networks organized in response to and out of the tensions that have arisen between visions of the political, social and cultural good pursued by secular human rights and humanitarian organizations and those pursued by religious humanitarian networks.
Regulating Sex/Religion: Secular Citizenship and the Politics of Diasporic Difference examins how sexuality and religion come together in the management of diasporic minorities in Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. The studio analyzes how secular rule, and the concomitant structure of secular citizenship, are subtended by the twinned regulation of religion and sexuality.
