Title: What you can say in London will get you arrested in New York: The global reach of British interfaith dialogue practices 

 Lecturer:  Marcy Brink-Danan (Hebrew University)

Room: Terrace, 4026

Date: 22.4.2014

This study investigates the circulation of linguistic prescriptivism (interfaith dialogue strategies) among and between British interfaith organizations and their global satellite offices. By examining sites along these agencies' global transmission chains this project investigates the historical, contextual and interactional forces shaping what people in each city believe is the right way to talk about diversity. What counts as diversity is, of course, an shifting ontological dilemma; in places where legislation, educational policy or other top-down strategies for managing difference are debated, the fixing of diversity into actionable categories appears a local problem, infused with – and inflamed by - urban, national or regional debates (Blommaert and Verscheuren 1998). For example, British axes of social differentiation long included race, ethnicity, class and gender; however, over the past decade religious diversity increasingly appears as an urgent problem to be solved through better interfaith communication practices. Through a linguistic ethnography of the global movement of ideas about how God-talk should sound, this project asks "What effect does motion have on ontologies of difference?" This work thus contributes to anthropological knowledge of how culture – in this case language ideologies about the right way to talk about God – is set into motion and how it changes along routes of transmission. It also demonstrates how interactions between global actors challenge the locally (and institutionally) designated categories of what constitutes diversity in the first place. I use linguistic data collected from British interfaith actors in London and New York to investigate super-diversity's theoretically centripetal bias, offering examples of how the centrifugal motion of diversity talk simultaneously universalizes and particularizes global ideas about difference and communication.