2023

This article presents the results of an ethnographic study on the educational biographies of young, religiously oriented Muslim women in German-speaking Switzerland. Using an intersectional theoretical perspective, the interplay of various constraining categories of difference in educational trajectories is examined. The intersectional category ‘Muslim woman’ – as argued based on empirical findings – significantly shapes the educational biographies of young women, acting as a powerful educational barrier in vocational education. This category emerges not merely through the intersection of ‘gender’ and ‘religion’ but also reflects the permeation of additional categories of difference, including ‘class,’ ‘migration background,’ and ‘race’. This article raises the question of the implications these empirical findings have for the theoretical examination of religion from an intersectional perspective. After a brief overview of the reception of an intersectional perspective in German-language religious studies and the presentation of a case study from the ethnographic study, it is proposed to conceive religion in educational biographies as an interdependent category. This proposal intendeds to contribute to adopting an intersectional perspective in religious studies to examine the biographical significance of religion in conjunction with other categories of difference.

This study uses social media comments on news reports about the exemption of religious communities in Germany from COVID-19 restrictions as empirical data for researching a contemporary, everyday understanding of religion as suggested by Michael Bergunder (2014). To analyse the discourse on religion, a qualitative content analysis is applied, which pre-structures the corpus. This allows for diverse attitudes towards policies on religion, as well as their correlations to understandings of religion to be identified. The results show that the contested role of religion in society and its relationship to the state is linked to the struggle over the filling of the concept of religion. Finally, a critical assessment following Bergunder’s approach is applied, emphasizing the need to research the current understanding of religion as a contested concept.