Belonging, Citizenship and Identities

Conveners: Marie Højlund Roesgaard, Associate professor, Japanese Studies and Brian Jacobsen, Scientific assistant, Sociology of Religion, both from the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies.

Conference theme

This session aims at developing aspects of the fourth Asian Dynamics Initiative theme: Belonging, Citizenship and Identities, by approaching it via investigations of forms and formats of order. The concern is the establishment of order (social, psychological, natural) and the various endeavours to ascribe discursively order and predictability to the surrounding world. It involves the assertion of things (ideas, persons, material objects, emotions, actions) being in their right place and it pertains to the different ways the world is made inhabitable, manageable and meaningful. Such practices can for example be seen in the production of school curricula, cultural canons, the establishment of memorial sites, the performance of civil religious rituals, various post-war reconciliation initiatives, the establishing of national churches abroad.

However, the concept 'order' itself has not been thoroughly and theoretically investigated in a cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary perspective. Further, a conventional approach to order has been to analyze power structures and institutional hegemony (top-down), but ‘the issue of order' also invites a more versatile approach, including voluntary participation in order-production and bottom-up perspectives.

Format

The panel will be organized as follows: Three persons will present their papers (20 min. each) and a discussant will comment on the papers after the presentations. At the end of each session there will be time for a few questions from the audience. The audience will include researchers working on the common ADI theme 4: Belonging, citizenship and identities. At the end of each conference day we will have a roundtable discussion between all presenters, discussants and the audience where we will discuss the themes of the day and how we can relate them to the development of the overall ADI theme 4.