PARTICIPANTS

Jonathan VanAntwerpen
Social Science Research Council

Jonathan VanAntwerpen is a program officer and research fellow at the Social Science Research Council, where he oversees projects on Religion and the Public Sphere. He is also a fellow at the NYU Institute for Public Knowledge.

Currently completing his Ph.D. in the department of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, he received a BA from Calvin College, and an MA in philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation investigates the transnational struggles over reconciliation that have occurred in the aftermath of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, focusing in particular on the ways that prominent conceptions of reconciliation have been transformed by both religious and secular engagements with the politics of transitional justice.

VanAntwerpen is co-editor (with Michael Burawoy) of an online volume entitled Producing Public Sociology (2nd edition, 2005), and co-author (with Craig Calhoun) of “Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and Hierarchy: ‘Mainstream’ Sociology and its Challengers” in Sociology in America (University of Chicago Press, 2007). Forthcoming publications include “Reconciliation Reconceived: Religion, Secularism, and the Language of Transition?” in Will Kymlicka and Bashir Bashir, eds., The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies (Oxford University Press); and “Moral Globalization and Discursive Struggle: Reconciliation, Transitional Justice, and Cosmopolitan Discourse” in Steven Heydemann and David C. Hammack, Philanthropic Projections: Sending Institutional Logics Abroad (Indiana University Press).

He is the editor of The Immanent Frame, an SSRC blog on secularism, religion, and the public sphere.

Paragraph Statement

Question: What do you think is the most important issue involving religion that confronts international NGOs?

In his statement for this workshop, Scott Appleby asks: "what stands in the way of effective collaboration or partnership between religious communities (or individuals) and international NGOs?" I want to ask a similar question about collaboration and engagement, a question that derives from my work as a program officer at the Social Science Research Council, an independent, not-for-profit organization that seeks -- in the words of SSRC President Craig Calhoun -- to promote and engender a more "public social science". What stands in the way of effective collaboration or partnership, I want to ask -- what stands in the way of building better bridges -- between international NGOs (religious or otherwise) and academic social scientists? We should immediately note that some such bridges already do exist -- as evidenced by many of the participants in this workshop. These bridges are often built and traversed in the concrete life trajectories, personal experiences, and organizational efforts of individuals -- those whose own work and commitments effectively blur the distinction between "academics" and "practitioners".

But we could do more, especially on the collective and organizational level. The challenge to build better bridges between academic social science and the work of international NGOs is complicated and context-specific. But with the aims of this workshop in view, let me make three brief suggestions:

First, while academic social scientists are not the only people with serious social knowledge -- indeed, while they are often in the position of having something to learn from their non-academic counterparts -- they may be able to analyze data in ways that reveal previously unrecognized or inadequately demonstrated patterns, to expand our understanding of the various forces at play in the specific domains in which international NGOs work, and to help such organizations reflect on their own efforts, partly through reflection on how such efforts have played out elsewhere. Social scientific knowledge does have the capacity to make a difference.

Second, and as a necessary corollary to this, academic social scientists should fully embrace the fact that the bridges to be built must make way for the flow of traffic in both directions. Our engagement with public constituencies of various sorts -- including international NGOs -- must move beyond a model which simply stipulates the production and subsequent dissemination of academic knowledge. The collaboration and engagement we seek must involve sustained conversation, and we must seek out and support opportunities for more traffic between the two worlds. Among other things, we ought to be interested in seeing to it that there are more individuals like those who are attending this workshop -- comfortable making their way productively back and forth between the world of academic research and the world of international engagement epitomized by the work of NGOs.

Third, in these conversations -- and especially when questions of religion are at play -- we ought to be exploring ways to encourage more productive exchanges between "religious" and "secular" perspectives, and in the process looking for the fissures and cracks in these categories themselves, the ways in which they only very loosely capture the realities we are interested in understanding, and the contexts in which we work and live. It would be too easy to simply say that the social sciences are "secular"; but social scientists have at times been hindered both by a neglect of religion's importance in international affairs, and by a set of (increasingly outdated though remarkably persistent) presuppositions about religion and the religious. As social scientists rethink their own secularist assumptions -- as more and more are doing today -- and as a wide range of actors debate an ostensible "resurgence" of religion in public and international life, both those who consider themselves "secular" and those who identify as "religious" (as well as the many not neatly captured by either category) ought to find ways to engage each other more productively. This is a requirement for the success of collaborations and partnerships between religious communities and NGOs, as Scott Appleby stresses. It is also an opportunity, a chance for academic and practitioners, religious and secular alike, to step outside their comfort zones, rethink their assumptions, engage with one another, and perhaps even -- here and there, now and then -- find that they can productively work together.

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