Canadian Association of Geographers 2015 | Vancouver, BC

In June 2015, I attended the Canadian Association of Geographers’ Annual Meeting in Vancouver, BC, held at Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) Harbour Centre and the Wosk Centre for Dialogue.

My paper was in a session entitled The Politics of Urban Social Policy 3, organized by Tom Baker (SFU), Cristina Temenos (Northeastern), and Joshua Evans (Athabasca), with Nick Blomley (SFU) as our respondent. The other presenters were Natalie Oswin (McGill) and Eugene McCann (SFU). Here was my abstract:

In this paper, I intervene in conversations about ‘postsecularism,’ the possibility of civic discussions between religious and secular citizens, in global cities, urban financial hubs attracting investment, skilled migration, and tourism that geographers have noted for their economic polarization and social exclusions. I do this through a case study of an interfaith coalition, Faith Communities Called to Solidarity with the Poor (FCCSP), in Vancouver, BC, in the mid-2000s. Ostensibly, FCCSP lobbied for the religious freedom of one evangelical Protestant congregation, Tenth Avenue Alliance Church, to conduct its homeless shelter and meal program without acquiring a social services permit. While the opposition called for secularization, this religious activism needs to be understood as contesting discourses that sought to render invisible the “poor,” the “socially excluded and economically marginalized” in material need of food and shelter (FCCSP 2007). FCCSP countered the aspirations of Tenth’s neighbourhood and Vancouver’s City Hall to become a global city, especially in the municipal policy Project Civil City attempting to produce a marketable urban landscape by reducing the rate of homelessness ahead of the 2010 Olympics. Not only do I demonstrate that these gentrifying processes developed into secularizing geographical visions, but I argue that the presence of the poor in religious communities means that the urban postsecular is not so much situated in dialogues between religious and secular citizens, but in material encounters in religious communities across class divisions exacerbated by global city aspirations. I substantiate this argument with key informant interviews with FCCSP and Vancouver’s City Hall. Combining work on global cities and gentrification with geographical debates about the postsecular, I advance conversations in human geography about religion in urban spaces by exploring the material work of religious actors in demystifying secular capitalist ideologies used to construct social exclusions in global cities.

I enjoyed the robust conversation that we had about urban social policy, and I especially enjoyed Blomley’s comments on my paper and the relationship between Project Civil City and religion. These comments are very helpful as I am taking this paper back to the drawing board and revising it for publication, from which I hope to generate more dialogue.