Geographies of Encounter

This edited collection explores forms of multi-religious cohabitation as well as the spatial arrangements that underpin and shape them through sixteen chapters that range across disciplines, historical periods, and global geographies. Focusing on interactions between different religious groups and traditions, the authors conceptualize three types of spatial arrangements and explore how they operate ad geographies of encounter; i.e., multi-religious places, multi-religious cities, and multi-religious landscapes. With perspectives from anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and geographers, the book demonstrates the multiple ways in which geographies of interreligious encounters and forms of multi-religious cohabitation have changed throughout history due to their embeddedness id different frameworks of political organization, shifting religious ideologies, and changing forms of human mobility. 

Marian Burchardt is Professor of Sociologyat Leipzig University, Germany. His research explores how power, diversity and subjectivity play out in public space. His the author of  Faith in the Time of AIDS (2015) and co-editor of Affective Trajectories: Religion and Emotion in African Cityscapes (2019).

Maria Chiara Giorda is Professor of History of Religions at University of Roma Tre, Italy. Her research interests are in religious education, geography of religions, history of monasticism, and religious diversity in public spaces. She is co-editor of the book Manuale di Scienze della Religione, 2019.