About the Project:
The Religion and Social Exclusion (RelEx) project conducts groundbreaking empirical research on the interplay between religion and social exclusion and develops a new mixed-methods framework specifically designed for the purpose. RelEx is cross-cultural in approach and scope, covering several distinct cultural and religious contexts across the wider national and cultural settings of Finland, Ghana, India, and Peru.
Social exclusion constitutes a multidimensional phenomenon that includes several mutually reinforcing cultural, political-legal, and social-structural dimensions, which effectively work to disengage a segment of the population from recourses and provisions vital to their quality of life. Social exclusion is also a context-dependent phenomenon that varies in its forms across particular social and cultural settings.
Previous social exclusion scholarship and policy alike have thus far been predominantly focused on macro- and Meso-level economic forms of social exclusion (e.g., poverty) at the expense of other non-economic factors that are typically overlooked and lumped together under the ambiguous rubric of “culture”. Religion constitutes a particularly neglected factor in the broader scholarship on social exclusion. Little is consequently known about the interplay between various forms of social exclusion and the religious outlooks of excluded people, especially on the micro-level of smaller communities, groups, and individuals. Although religion can provide socially excluded people with recourses for coping with experiences of inadequacy, stigma, or cultural prejudices, the interplay between religion and social exclusion is considerably more complex and cannot be adequately understood through a limited focus on coping alone. RelEx answers to the need for further systematic and comparative research on the broader range of ways in which religion can become implicated in processes of social exclusion from the perspective of socially excluded people themselves
RelEx avoids essentialist understandings of religion in favor of a more sustained focus on what people across different social and cultural contexts understand religion to “be” or “mean” and what role it plays in their everyday lives. In RelEx, such a more encompassing approach is further complemented by an additional focus on peoples’ basic values. An added complementary focus on basic values provides important insights into how socially excluded people act and orient themselves in their respective social worlds, as well as how they view their own religious commitments and position themselves towards religion more generally. Combining and complementing a more encompassing understanding of religion with an added focus on basic values allows us to explore the religious outlooks of socially excluded people as part of a broader configuration of life-experiences- orientations-, and priorities.
