Main interests Secularism, Feminism | ||
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Website religionanddiversity.ca Influences William E. Connolly, Michel Foucault, Dorothy E. Smith Alma mater University of New Brunswick People also search for Solange Lefebvre, Peter Beyer Books Defining Harm: Religious, Shared Beliefs - Different, Deep Equality in an Era of, Gender in Canada : a Multidime | ||
Whose religion lori g beaman part 1
Lori G. Beaman, Ph.D., LLB. (born 1963, New Brunswick, Canada) is a Canadian scholar best known for her work in religious diversity, religious freedom, religion in the public sphere, secularism and the intersections of religion and law. Trained in philosophy, sociology and law, she holds the Canada Research Chair in the Contextualization of Religion in a Diverse Canada and is a Full Professor at the University of Ottawa in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies. In 2015, Beaman was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Academy of the Arts and Humanities, Canada’s highest academic honour, for her work on religious diversity and her emerging model of deep equality.
Contents
Whose religion lori g beaman part 2
Academic History
Beaman earned her B.A. in philosophy (1985), an LL.B. in law (1987), an M.A. in sociology (1992), and a Ph.D. in sociology (1996) from the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, NB, Canada. She was admitted to the law society of New Brunswick in 1988 and practiced law for five years before her graduate studies. Beaman has held professorships at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec and The University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Alberta. She is the Canada Research Chair in the Contextualization of Religion in a Diverse Canada and full professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. She teaches Religion and Law, Theory and Method, and Religion in Contemporary Canada.
The Religion and Diversity Project
Beaman is the principal investigator of the Religion and Diversity Project [1], a $2.5 million, seven-year, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Major Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI) headquartered at the University of Ottawa. She guides a team of 37 international researchers who study religious diversity in Canada as well as Australia, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. The project explores the contours of religious diversity and how to best respond to opportunities and challenges presented by religious diversity in ways that promote a just and peaceful society. Researchers look at the social construction of religious identities, how religion is defined and delimited in law and public policy, and how gender and sexuality emerge as volatile issues in debates over religious freedom. Perspectives from multiple academic disciplines inform the work of the project, including anthropology, communication, education, history, law, philosophy, political science, religious studies, and sociology.[2] Advocating a shift away from the language and frameworks of tolerance and accommodation, Beaman and her team of researchers focus on the creation of innovative approaches to religious diversity in order to foster substantive or deep equality.
Religion and Law
Beaman has written extensively on religious diversity and the intersections of religion and law. In her 2008 book Defining Harm: Religious Freedom and the Limits of the Law, she explores the case of an adolescent cancer patient whose objection to blood transfusions was based on religious conviction. The ensuing legal fray exposed what Beaman characterized as a “culture of fear” and the construction of the religious 'other' as a threat to social order (7). The work offers a critical socio-legal analysis, drawing on Foucauldian notions of genealogies of power, sedimentation, and resistance to explain how religious minorities (in particular post 9/11 Muslims) or those on the margins of normative religion are perceived as destabilizing forces that “threaten a Christian hegemony that is itself in flux and under revision" (5). Beaman points to “law’s privileged status” as a “producer of truth” and engages the work of Carol Smart who proposes the decentering of law in order to create more comprehensive depictions of social life (7-8). Beaman's publication record demonstrates a preoccupation with how the courts define religion and how the normalization or marginalization of certain religious groups influences the interpretation of religious freedom. She has also written about polygamy and how law frames certain types of family structures. Her commentaries on government responses to religion in the public sphere (such as the proposed Charter of Québec Values) [3] and the complexities of religious freedom have appeared on the academic blog The Immanent Frame [4] and in the Tony Blair Faith Foundation’s Global Perspectives Series, where she emphasized the need for positive narratives and more nuanced understandings of intra-religious diversity. [5] Her work on diversity also considers non-belief and non-religious world views, including the growing social significance of those who identify as religious 'nones'. The status and voices of nones are a concern for Beaman, as they fall outside the purview of religious freedom protections. Beaman’s career corpus demonstrates a commitment to the broad themes of justice, fairness, equality and inclusion.
Deep Equality
In 2015, the Royal Society of Canada acknowledged Beaman's contributions to the study of religious diversity in Canada and her research on deep equality. In the article Deep Equality as an Alternative to Accommodation and Tolerance (2014), Beaman contends that the conceptualization of diversity as a problem to be solved sets up a hierarchy of privilege whereby majorities or host cultures bestow tolerance or accommodation on minorities. She rejects the language of tolerance and accommodation as frameworks for the management of this “crisis of diversity,” in favor of a model she refers to as deep equality (90). Informed in part by political theorist William E. Connolly’s thoughts on deep pluralism and agonistic respect, Beaman’s paradigm of deep equality proposes the displacement of conflict narratives with a focus on empirical evidence from the successful negotiation of religious diversity in the quotidian. She argues that the exploration, understanding and mapping of micro-level instances of day-to-day cooperation and collaboration between ordinary people are crucial to shifting the perception of diversity as a problem to one of opportunity. Beaman engages Connolly’s notion of agnostic respect as foundational to the work of deep equality, noting that “respect is 'agonistic' because it requires the abandonment of rightness and the conviction that one is imbued with the truth through some sort of transcendent authority" (98). She also points to static representations of religion and rigid religious identities (particularly as perpetuated in the media), as well as an overreliance on law to resolve disputes as persistent impediments to the progress of deep equality. “Law,” according to Beaman “has colonized the meaning of equality, watering it down and displacing it with concepts like ‘reasonable accommodation’ and tolerance" (92). Beaman argues three points: "1. That tolerance and accommodation are inappropriate frameworks to facilitate human thriving in a diverse context; 2. That a reconstituted notion of equality can subvert the binaries that are kept alive by tolerance and accommodation; 3. That positive narratives offer a map toward a renewed conceptualization of equality, and a recognition of day-to-day human activity in its constitution" (104). Beaman draws from the disciplines of law, neuroscience, philosophy, political theory, sociology, and social psychology, among others, to inform her emerging model of deep equality. She projects the utility of deep equality as a lens for exploring inequality in a broad range of areas including economics, environmental relations, gender, race, religion, and sexuality. The broad notion of respect is a recurrent theme emerging from Beaman’s research, with "the values of caring, neighborliness and shared humanity" as core components of deep equality’s emphasis on striving to live well together with difference (98). Beaman’s work on human/non-human animal relationships is likewise linked to her interest in the diversity of religious and non-religious world views and their expression in everyday interactions. She is currently conducting empirical research on the global phenomenon of sea turtle rescue, employing aspects of the lived religion approach to explore identity construction in late modernity and narratives of cooperation that emerge from human engagement with both animals and the environment.
Awards and Honors
2015 Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Academy of the Arts and Humanities [6]
2014 Resident, Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, Bellagio, Italy
2010 - 2017 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) $2.5 million grant, Major Collaborative Research Initiatives. Project Title: Religious Diversity and Its Limits: Moving Beyond Tolerance and Accommodation [7]
2010 Visiting Fellowship, Atlantic Human Rights Centre, New Brunswick, Canada
2006–present Canada Research Chair in the Contextualization of Religion in a Diverse Canada [8]
1997 - 1999 Young Scholars in American Religion Program
Influences
William E. Connolly
Michel Foucault
Dorothy E. Smith