15 December 2021

Speaker: Andrea Cassatella, Makerere University
Chaired by: Dr Shadaab Rahemtulla, University of Edinburgh

Seminar co-hosted by RACE.ED and the University of Edinburgh School of Divinity, examining the contemporary relationship between religion and politics by turning to the work of Jacques Derrida to interrogate the foundations of modern secular discourse. Addressing the challenge that the resurgence of public religions poses to modern epistemic models and political forms, the talk illuminates secularism’s entanglements with the legacy of colonialism, exposing the racial features of secular understandings about language, epistemology, religion and politics that travel worldwide through processes of globalization.

Andrea Cassatella
Andrea Cassatella is a Senior Research Fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research, Makerere University, Uganda. His work cuts across the disciplines of philosophy, political thought and anthropology, centering translation as a method of critical inquiry and transformative praxis. Andrea's current work focuses on the thought of Frantz Fanon and adopts his notion of psychic life to critically rethink issues of political sustainability and knowledge production in Africa. Before Joining Makerere, he was Assistant Professor of Humanities at Al Quds University, Jerusalem, and held research fellowships at Columbia Global Centers | Amman, the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, and the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa, University of Ghana. Prior to his doctoral studies, he served as Community Service Officer for the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees missions in Bosnia Herzegovina and Djibouti.

Dr Shadaab Rahemtulla
Dr Shadaab Rahemtulla is Lecturer in Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. A Muslim liberation theologian, he is the author of "Qur'an of the Oppressed: Liberation Theology and Gender Justice in Islam" (Oxford University Press, 2017).