Time: 6:00pmVenue: David Sizer Lecture Theatre, Bancroft Building, Mile End Campus,
Third Sector organisations associated with welfare, care and justice have become a significant element in the contemporary political and ethicallandscape. These include a notable segment that is faithmotivated and founded on attempts to practice and perform theo-ethics. Far from simply being co-opted into neoliberal ideology and subject-formation, these organisations can represent spaces of resistance to neoliberalism. Moreover, in the possibility of establishing practical partnerships of postsecular rapprochement between different faith-related and non-religious groups, these ethical spaces can, I argue, become hopeful spaces of collaborative care and empowerment. In this way, postsecularism may be understood not as an epochal shift in the relations between the secular and the religious, but (following Klaus Eder and Jurgen Habermas) as a process by which the “hushed up voice of religion” in the public sphere is being heard again within specific postsecular technologies and spaces of reflexive ethical translation andcrossover ethical narratives.
Paul Cloke is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Exeter, having previously held Chairs at the University of Bristol and University of Wales. Over the last decade he has been involved in collaborative research into ethical geographies, focusing in particular on responses to homelessness, the new politics of ethical consumption and the growing significance of faith-based or theo-ethics in contemporary society. He is currently engaged in research on postsecularism and faith-based interventions in a range of welfare and justice arenas. His latest books include: Swept Up Lives? Reenvisioning the Homeless City (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, with Jon May and Sarah Johnsen); Globalising Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, with Clive Barnett, Nick Clarke and Alice Malpass) and Faith-based Organisations and Social Exclusion in European Cities (Policy Press, 2012, with Justin Beaumont)
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