International Symposium on

Religious Pluralism and European Integration:

New Challenges

Call for Papers

The University of Milan-Bicocca – School of Law and the Jean Monnet Module of Religious Pluralism organize their first seminar in “Religious Pluralism and European Integration: New Challenges” on Friday, September 28, 2018.

The full-day symposium will be held in both English and Italian and it will feature three roundtables and three panels, each with three presenters.

The convenor invites submissions from academics in Public, Constitutional, International, EU and Ecclesiastic law at all levels, from doctoral candidates to senior professors, with particular reference to young scholars (i.e. PhD Students and Fellow Researchers).

Submissions may address one or more of the following subjects from national, comparative or European perspectives:

1) EU citizenship and religious identity. The coexistence of diverse faiths within the European religious landscape could simultaneously represent a divisive factor and an element of integration. The issue at stake is therefore a crucial test for the future of European integration. The roundtable brings together interdisciplinary scholars to address critical matters of religion, identity and interfaith understanding in Europe, including the admission of Turkey into the EU, the identities of diverse religious communities in secular Europe and their legal framework.

2) Religious freedom and religious symbols in the public space. European constitutional landscape posits two rather than one freedom of religion. In addition to the classical individual freedom of and from religion, in its very structure Europe represents a second, collective and identity freedom, conceptually stemming from self-determination, namely the freedom of States to include in their self-definition a more or less robust entanglement of religion and religious symbols. This roundtable is aimed at tackling the delicate issue of the so-called “naked wall” in the public sphere, addressing the dilemma of the place of religion in an ever-secular Europe.

3) EU non-discrimination law and freedom of religion. As it is well known, in the EU context, European institutions manifestly prefer non-discrimination to equality, thus hinting at a conceptual move to from equality as a modulation of law according to the varieties of life to non-discrimination as uniformity. What are the effects of this shift for freedom of religion and religious diversity? Bringing together scholars from different disciplines the roundtable tackles the challenges of religious diversity in the EU non-discrimination legislation.

Interested scholars are invited to submit a short CV and an abstract no longer than 600 words by June 4, 2018. The abstract must be sent in .doc or .docx format, and must indicate the author’s name, the title and the panel to which it would belong amongst one of the three above mentioned.

Abstracts have to be sent via email to paolo.zicchittu@unimib.it

Applicants will be notified by June 18, 2018.

Full drafts of papers will be due by email to paolo.zicchittu@unimib.it no later than September 7, 2018. Papers should be no longer than 40,000 characters (footnotes and spaces included).

 For additional information, please contact Dr. Paolo Zicchittu, paolo.zicchittu@unimib.it

Milan, April 23, 2018

(The convener Professor Natascia Marchei)