Collaborative Research: Places of Worship and the Politics of Citizenship: Immigrants and Communities of Faith in the New South

This proposed research will investigate the ways in which places of religious worship serve as spaces for the production of citizenship between immigrants and non-immigrants. Our proposed research adopts a political conceptualization of citizenship - one that regards citizenship as a fluid set of norms, attitudes, expectations, and practices that establish belonging in a given polity through negotiations in the various spaces of daily life. We bring front and center the aims, orientations, and workings of faith communities, which are central to the lives of many immigrants and which are instrumental in shaping political practices and outlooks. We emphasize that the terms of citizenship are expressed, enforced, contested, and transformed through encounters and interactions between people in the spaces of everday life.