Gender equality, cultural diversity, religious pluralism: State policies and feminist interventions (PLUREQ) (completed)

About the project

Questions of cultural diversity, religious attachments and citizenship rights and identities, have become crucially important to public policies across Europe, and cultural diversity is increasingly debated by reference to practices involving the family, marriage, sexuality, and gender roles. New tensions have developed on central policy issues. How to respect practices of arranged marriage while still ensuring that young people are protected from forced marriage? How to design effective legal protection against ethnic and/or religious discrimination? How to accommodate religious manifestations in public settings?

Although gender equality issues are at the core in many diversity controversies, the two are still very much treated as two separate policy areas. The overall goal of the PLUREQ project is to generate new, critical and comprehensive knowledge of policy making and women’s agency at the intersections of gender equality, cultural diversity and religious pluralism that can serve as a tool of analysis for citizens, policymakers and the academic community.

As such, PLUREQ represents the first comprehensive attempt to systematically map and analyse the intersections of policies of gender equality, cultural diversity and religious pluralism in Norway. It raises questions about democratic participation, minority women’s political mobilisation,  in group power relations and the impact of state policies on minority communities.

Financing

The project is funded by the IMER programme of the Research Council of Norway.