Studies in Comparative Politics

The critical study and analysis of space is an area of increasing interest and work among scholars. This work examines a wide range of spatial questions, including how religions and religious practitioners build, arrange, and live within physical space; how they conceive and logically organize, classify, and design space; the complex socio-religious meanings and significations ascribed to space by those who use and occupy it, including meanings that often become the basis for contestation and conflict. To date, however, no series exists that focuses and promotes scholarship examining space in light of religion, broadly defined, and religious questions, meanings, and issues. The series seeks to address that publishing lacuna by encouraging scholarship on religion and spatial studies. It is conceived as interdisciplinary in scope, due to the fact that religion and space are topics potentially, even necessarily, involving a number of disciplines: physics and the natural sciences (including cognitive sciences, neurobiology, and the scientific study of social phenomena in terms of bio-cultural foundations), the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, psychology), architecture and geography (how architecture expresses religious ideas and meaning), philosophy, art, literature, cinema, archaeology, biblical studies, and other humanities sub-disciplines. Each of these fields analyze religion and space in distinct ways, and scholars in each field stand to benefit from a series in which the critical study of religion and space are the foci, even as they are investigated in different ways. Thus the series has the potential to be of relevance to a number of fields. This series analyzes how religion stands alongside these various disciplines as opposed to being subsumed by them. In other words, religion serves as a comparative and dialogical partner with them. The series seeks to encourage scholarly understandings of religion, that is, the diverse religious understandings of the world and space(s) within which individuals, cultures, and societies move, create, and find their meanings.