Postdoctoral Researcher

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Postdoctoral Researcher - Interreligious Dialogue, Power and Global Discourses

KU Leuven is an autonomous university. It was founded in 1425. It was born of and has grown within the Catholic tradition.

How did interreligious dialogue become a global response to religious diversity, conflict, and social cohesion - and which religious, secular, and colonial assumptions continue to shape it? Would you like to investigate these questions and contribute to an international and interdisciplinary research project on interreligious dialogue? Then we invite you to apply for this postdoctoral research position.

The Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at KU Leuven is looking for a postdoctoral researcher to investigate the global genealogies and discourses of interreligious dialogue and to contribute to the comparative and theoretical development of a larger research project on interreligious dialogue in different societal contexts.

Project

Interreligious dialogue (IRD) has become an important tool worldwide for addressing religious diversity. Although dialogue is often presented as a universal means of promoting mutual understanding, social cohesion, and peaceful coexistence, critical scholars point out that contemporary dialogical practices may also be intertwined with Christian normativity, secular governance logics, and colonial legacies. This project examines these tensions by critically analyzing the historical development, discursive shaping, and local implementation of interreligious dialogue.

As a postdoctoral researcher, you will lead the research package that examines the global genealogies and discourses of interreligious dialogue. You will analyze how international organizations, Christian churches, and global Islamic organizations have framed interreligious dialogue, particularly since the security shift following 9/11, as a response to religious diversity, violence, extremism, citizenship, and social cohesion. In doing so, you will examine how different discursive traditions converge, diverge, or are in tension with one another, and to what extent contemporary dialogical discourses reproduce, transform, or challenge colonial, Christian, and secular normative frameworks.

You will use Discourse-Historical Analysis and qualitative analytical methods to analyze an extensive corpus of policy documents, ecclesiastical texts, and statements from international religious organizations. Based on this research, you will develop a series of scholarly publications and make a significant contribution to the theoretical elaboration of the project.

In addition, you will play a central role in the comparative synthesis of the entire research project. Together with the Principal Investigator (PI) and the research team, you will develop a comparative and power-sensitive theoretical framework that links the findings from the discursive research with the ethnographic studies in Flanders and Morocco, thereby contributing to an innovative theoretical framework on interreligious dialogue as a global discourse and local practice.

Responsibilities

• You will conduct independent research into the genealogies and global discourses of interreligious dialogue.
• You will build an international corpus of policy documents, ecclesiastical texts, and documents from international religious organizations and analyze it using Discourse-Historical Analysis and qualitative analytical methods, including NVivo.
• You will develop your own research agenda within the project's objectives and publish the results in international peer-reviewed journals.
• You will assume academic leadership of th