Religion and politics

Description
In this session I’ll talk about my research with the REDO project, firstly in Hong Kong and secondly in London. I’ll describe the Occupy approach to democracy (called horizontal process), and w...ill then discuss Occupy as an attempt to get away from utilitarian or means–ends approaches to politics and life generally, and as festival occasions that manifest the sacred by placing alternative political values – such as friendship – to the fore. I’ll also suggest that concepts drawn from Religious Studies, such as fetishism and iconoclasm, are particularly useful to the study of these protest movements, because they locate political agency not in leaders or parties but in assemblies of human and non-human agents.