Between Globalization, Secularization, and Radicalization: Revisiting Biography and Religious Trajectories

Over the past three decades, processes of globalization as well as the global and transnational turn in the study of religion have come along with critical reassessments of established concepts such as, for instance, secularization, pluralization and conversion. Scholars have argued that secularization and pluralization are neither linear global processes nor do they map neatly onto political and cultural geographies. Thus, there are multiple processes of secularization and de-secularization, of pluralization and radicalization in the Global South and the Global North while all of these processes are framed and inextricably linked to the global condition. In this panel, we explore how such processes play out on the biographical level, at the same time examining the ways in which macro-processes are sustained through people's biographical experiences, choices and trajectories. Thus, we draw on the interest in these global religious processes and make them useful for the study of biographical trajectories, family histories, and life narratives. We focus on the following questions:

• Which elements shape secularization on the level of biographies and life stories? How is secularization shaped through individual experiences of modern social processes?
• Do (a-)religious self-presentations differ in more or less secularized environments?
• How do we interpret and explain the parallel processes of secularization and religious radicalization from a biographical perspective?
• Are there joint elements of biographies characterized by processes of fundamentalization?

We are interested in papers that connect the study of religion with processual and life historical perspectives.