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Abstract
This two-day workshop brings together scholars, practitioners and community partners to interrogate how religion and spirituality shape and are reshaped by youth mobilities, immobilities and imagined futures across Africa-Europe circuits. We invite theoretically grounded and empirically rich contributions that centre African epistemologies and youth agency to move beyond methodological nationalism and Eurocentric/Christocentric frames. How do pre-departure rituals, prophecies and divination inform route choice, timing and risk? When and why do practices intensify, hybridise or fall quiet in transit? What objects, texts and digital artefacts become “portable shrines,” and how do they travel?
We probe waithood, precarity and aspiration: does faith narrate waiting as virtue, strategy or trap; how do gendered ideals of adulthood meet “a good future”? We examine religion as both a driver and infrastructure: from prosperity sermons and spiritual assignments that catalyse migration to churches, mosques and African Indigenous Religions circles, as de facto welfare hubs, and the tensions that arise when pastoral care overlaps with immigration advice. We also foreground digital transnationalism: how do WhatsApp, TikTok and livestreams re-scale belonging; what counts as a “sacred remittance”; how do algorithms amplify or silence youth voices? Finally, we invite decolonising methods and Southern theorising: what happens to transnationalism, mobilities, and lived-religion theories when built from African youth epistemologies? Which creative/participatory methods best capture movement, secrecy, and sacredness?
The workshop will attempt to address some of these themes. It will take place over two days: Thursday, 30 April and Friday, 1 May 2026. It builds on an ESRC award, The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Transnational Young People of African Migrant Background (ES/X002276/1).
Workshop themes:
- Indigenous epistemologies and reimagining mobility
- Decolonising methods and Southern theorising youth
- Religion as a driver and infrastructure of migration
- Digital transnationalism, hybrid practice and sacred remittances
- Youth, waithood, risk and aspirations
- Gendered and generational religious politics
- Mapping futures (a dialogue with activists and policy makers)
There is no charge for the workshop, but we are unable to offer any support for travel and accommodation
Abstract Submission
Please send abstracts (200 words + title), together with your name, position, institutional affiliation and discipline to Dominic Pasura (Dominic.Pasura@glasgow.ac.uk) and Nomatter Sande (Nomatter.Sande@glasgow.ac.uk) by Friday, 13 February 2026.
Decisions about selected abstracts will be communicated by 28 February 2026. All participants will be expected to submit full papers of 7,000–8,000 words, including references, no later than 18 April 2026.
