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Social Science Sociology Of Religion

Beyond Accommodation

Everyday Narratives of Muslim Canadians

by (author) Jennifer Selby, Amélie Barras & Lori G. Beaman

Publisher
UBC Press
Initial publish date
Sep 2018
Category
Sociology of Religion, Cultural, General
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780774838313
    Publish Date
    Sep 2018
    List Price
    $32.99
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780774838283
    Publish Date
    Sep 2018
    List Price
    $89.95
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780774838290
    Publish Date
    Mar 2019
    List Price
    $32.95

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Description

Problems – of integration, failed political participation, and requests for various kinds of accommodation – seem to dominate the research on minority Muslims in Western nations. Beyond Accommodation offers a different perspective, showing how Muslim Canadians successfully navigate and negotiate their religiosity in the more mundane moments of their lives.

 

Drawing on interviews with Muslims in Montreal and St. John’s, Selby, Barras, and Beaman examine moments in which religiosity is worked out. They critique the model of reasonable accommodation, which has been lauded internationally for acknowledging and accommodating religious and cultural differences. The authors suggest that it disempowers religious minorities by implicitly privileging Christianity and by placing the onus on minorities to make requests for accommodation. The interviewees show that informal negotiation occurs all the time; scholars, however, have not been paying attention. This book advances a new model for studying the navigation and negotiation of religion in the public sphere and presents an alternative picture of how religious difference is woven into the fabric of Canadian society.

About the authors

Jennifer A. Selby is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies and an affiliate member of the Department of Gender Studies at Memorial University.

Jennifer Selby's profile page

Amélie Barras is an associate professor in the Department of Social Science at York University.

Amélie Barras' profile page

Lori G. Beaman is Professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Religion and Diversity Project. She is also a Canada Research Chair in the Contextualization of Religion in a Diverse Canada.

Lori G. Beaman's profile page

Editorial Reviews

"In sum[...]Beyond Accommodation offers a useful contrast to the more politically oriented approach of reasonable accommodation. It shows the potential for ethnographic research to highlight the local particularities of secular political discourses and frameworks and, in doing so, to productively critique representations of secular neutrality claims that tend to reproduce a kind of ‘view from nowhere’."

Anthropologica

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