Democratic societies depend on an understanding of the processes that motivate ethnic and religious minorities to contribute and identify with civil society. This project examines how religious minorities represent themselves in an effort to gain acceptance by the larger secular society of which they are a part. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, asks how minority groups in democratic societies increasingly identify with, and invoke their religious identities toward their objectives for recognition and acceptance. Findings from this case study would be developed and shared with other researchers, building international scientific collaboration. Funding for this project will also broaden the participation of a historically underrepresented group in the sciences.
Randeep Hothi, under the supervision of Dr. Webb Keane of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor will explore how religious minority groups strategically represent themselves for the purposes of recognition. The researcher examines minority-operated media networks in order to examine how deliberations that occur at the scale of face-to-face interaction produce publicly circulating religious discourse. This project builds on recent research in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics that pay close attention to language-use as a resource for positioning and orienting subjects in social life. The researcher looks at Sikh cultural production, a context that proves to be important for analyzing language-use and stance in sociolinguistics because of the processes of self-presentation are driven by recognition-based cultural politics. By examining how minority cultural producers make complicated decisions about how Sikhism should be publicly presented, which representations of Sikhism should be disseminated, and how they will address their audiences, this research will also explain how multicultural societies produce religious discourse. The 12-month field research project employs a range of conventional linguistic and ethnographic methods of data collection and analyses, including participant observation, interviews, breaching experiments, life history interviews, media and archival analysis, and discourse analysis. This research provides an opportunity to examine the wider ramifications of minority cultural production in secular societies, and how minority identities are articulated and socially situated in public address.
