Overview | Schedule

Cities and Fundamentalisms: A Conference

November 30, 2007 - 9:00AM- 5:00PM
Wurster Auditorium, UC Berkeley

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California at Berkeley is pleased to host the Cities and Fundamentalisms conferences. The first introductory workshop of this project took place at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC from June 15-16, 2007. The workshop brought together 9 academics and researchers from around the world with a distinct, but not limited, focus on cities of the Middle East and South Asia. The paper topics and discussions have pointed the way to several interesting dimensions that could be usefully compared across regions, from the term 'fundamentalism' as a problematic construct to describe religious activism in different parts of the world to questions of religious identity, urban citizenship and space. The workshop participants cast the discussion in terms of specific cities and not simply the various forms of fundamentalisms to take into account fundamentalism as a recalibrating force within contemporary urban citizenship. An underlying concern of the papers was the variety of ways in which dominant religious groups use exclusionary mechanisms through their claims to righteousness to guard their right to the city and in the process, shape the current landscape of cities.

What follows is the Program for the Berkeley Conference

In partnership with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (WWICS), CMES presents a joint research project to examine "Cities and Fundamentalism." This collaboration will undertake a serious study of the intellectual and practical challenges posed by fundamentalist groups, movements, and organizations with a special but not exclusive focus on religious ones with the intent of understanding how they are affected by the urban condition and how they affect the urban landscape. The project encourages disciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship pertaining to popular religious movements that works at the intersection of urban studies and identity studies.

This conference is co-sponsored by the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE), and the Middle East Program (MEP) and the Comparative Urban Studies Project (CUSP) of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (WWICS).