In this blog post, Shylashri Shankar reflects on the main lessons from A Secular Age Beyond the West: Religion, Law and the State in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, a book she edited with Mirjam Kunkler John Madeley. The book traces the origins of religion and secularity in countries that have remained relatively untouched by Western Christianity. The cases […]

In the third instalment of CORD’s blog series, Ranjita Mohanty follows Fiona Anciano in reflecting on the subsistence of fishing communities, this time in India. Here, once again, we discover fishers who must navigate tensions wrought by poorly designed and enforced state regulations, uncompromising market forces, and a history of regressive identity politics. Mohanty’s account […]

Welcome back to CORD’s blog series. In our second instalment, we once again find ourselves in Cape Town’s Hout Bay. This time, the University of the Western Cape’s Fiona Anciano brings us into the precarious lives of the area’s fisherfolk. Wedged between South Africa’s complex racial politics, ill-conceived fishing quotas, and vagaries of the international […]

In the first instalment of CORD’s new blog series, the University of the Western Cape’s Laurence Piper reflects on Cape Town’s prevailing media landscape. He describes a recent encounter with two newspapers from the city’s Hout Bay area, and how they represent the lives of white and black citizens in different ways. These representations, Piper suggests, […]