Doctoral Dissertation Research: Strategies for Cultural Recognition and Acceptance among Religious Minorities

民主社会依赖于对激励少数民族和宗教少数派作出贡献并认同公民社会的进程的理解。这个项目研究了宗教少数群体如何表现自己，以努力获得他们所处的更大的世俗社会的接受。这个项目训练一名研究生如何进行严格的以经验为基础的科学实地考察，探讨民主社会中的少数群体如何越来越多地认同并援引他们的宗教身份来实现他们的目标，以获得认可和接受。这一案例研究的结果将得到发展，并与其他研究人员分享，从而建立国际科学合作。对这个项目的资助还将扩大一个历史上代表性不足的群体在科学领域的参与。在密歇根大学安娜堡分校的韦伯·基恩博士的指导下，兰迪普·霍希将探讨宗教少数群体如何战略性地代表自己，以获得认可。研究人员研究了少数民族经营的媒体网络，以研究面对面互动规模下的讨论如何产生公开传播的宗教话语。该项目建立在语言人类学和社会语言学的最新研究基础上，这些研究密切关注语言使用，将其作为社会生活中主体定位和定向的资源。研究人员着眼于锡克教的文化生产，这一背景被证明对分析语言使用和社会语言学立场很重要，因为自我呈现的过程是由基于认知的文化政治驱动的。通过研究少数民族文化生产者如何就如何公开呈现锡克教、传播锡克教的哪些表现形式以及如何向受众发表演讲等问题做出复杂的决定，本研究还将解释多元文化社会如何产生宗教话语。这项为期12个月的实地研究项目采用了一系列传统的语言和民族志数据收集和分析方法，包括参与观察、访谈、突破实验、生活史访谈、媒体和档案分析以及话语分析。这项研究提供了一个机会来研究世俗社会中少数民族文化生产的更广泛影响，以及少数民族身份是如何在公共演讲中表达和社会定位的。

Democratic societies depend on an understanding of the processes that motivate ethnic and religious minorities to contribute and identify with civil society. This project examines how religious minorities represent themselves in an effort to gain acceptance by the larger secular society of which they are a part. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, asks how minority groups in democratic societies increasingly identify with, and invoke their religious identities toward their objectives for recognition and acceptance. Findings from this case study would be developed and shared with other researchers, building international scientific collaboration. Funding for this project will also broaden the participation of a historically underrepresented group in the sciences. Randeep Hothi, under the supervision of Dr. Webb Keane of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor will explore how religious minority groups strategically represent themselves for the purposes of recognition. The researcher examines minority-operated media networks in order to examine how deliberations that occur at the scale of face-to-face interaction produce publicly circulating religious discourse. This project builds on recent research in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics that pay close attention to language-use as a resource for positioning and orienting subjects in social life. The researcher looks at Sikh cultural production, a context that proves to be important for analyzing language-use and stance in sociolinguistics because of the processes of self-presentation are driven by recognition-based cultural politics. By examining how minority cultural producers make complicated decisions about how Sikhism should be publicly presented, which representations of Sikhism should be disseminated, and how they will address their audiences, this research will also explain how multicultural societies produce religious discourse. The 12-month field research project employs a range of conventional linguistic and ethnographic methods of data collection and analyses, including participant observation, interviews, breaching experiments, life history interviews, media and archival analysis, and discourse analysis. This research provides an opportunity to examine the wider ramifications of minority cultural production in secular societies, and how minority identities are articulated and socially situated in public address.