Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University.

Sound Production: Khalid Siraj

Image Credit: Northwestern University

Through this conversation, Hurd helps us critically reflect on the meanings of “religious minority” in global politics as religion has emerged as probably the most prominent pivot around which the majority-minority division is being mobilized. As a result of it being a wide register encompassing different aspects of affective, existential, and collective experience, and what it means to be human, religion becomes an easy way to categorize people. She problematizes the importance attributed to religion as a determining category in citizenship, governance and law. Something as vast and fluid as religion cannot be defined without exclusions. The same goes for nationalist conceptions that seek to define certain religious groups as minorities and some others as the majority. She also problematizes easy binaries such as sacred and secular, "good" religion and "bad religion", and majority and minority, especially as those that are imbricated in histories of colonialism, empire, and racism. Rather than adopting pluralism as a normative fixed framework of governance and politics, Hurd points to the idea of "pluralization" (William Connolly) as a process and continuum, which can be more open and inclusive.