COORDINATION: Júlia Garraio and Luciane Lucas dos Santos

POLICREDOS is a working group that gathers researchers whose research projects focus on religions or intersect religious issues.

Grounded on intersectional approaches, the working group aims to analyse the complex, context-based and interdisciplinary relationship between gender, politics, and religions, in order to reassure non-reified perspectives. Departing from analyses rooted in areas such as Theology, Social and Human Sciences, Political Science, and Cultural Studies, the POLICREDOS group promotes interdisciplinary dialogues that call for multiple articulations and different angles regarding themes that are polyhedral in themselves.

POLICREDOS is concerned with the (re)emergence of new (and old) forms of nationalism and how gender issues (e.g. campaigns and discourses against the so-called “gender ideology”), in articulation with religious and political discourses, often constitute engines or instruments of socio-political mobilisation towards social exclusion. Our approach is based on five pillars:

1. A critical discussion about the partisan vision of religious canons that has hampered debate on religion, politics and gender, as well as the shaping of societies as spaces of cultural/religious diversity and tolerance;

2. A debate that also questions the prevalent politics of religious diversity and religions identity within European societies, considering the historicity associated with the transformation of Europe into the Modern West;

3. Attention towards religious diversity in Europe, particularly focusing on Southern European contexts and their interactions with the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America;

4. Articulation of the historically-based connections between ethnic and racial identities, national imaginaries and religious affiliations that currently inform the governance of “minorities” and the construction of their political struggles and subjectivities;

5. A critique of the construction of "Otherness" within the limits of a religious approach that claims to be ecumenical and interreligious.

The POLICREDOS Working Group organises scientific seminars and debates with guest speakers and CES researchers, hosting visiting researchers. It is also part of the network of researcher in religion (ReliMM) in Portugal.