National Identities

Navigating Emotional Politics: Religious Communities, Migration Experiences and the Boundaries of National Belonging

I. Framework 
While emotion has received growing attention across migration and religious studies, there remains scope for further investigation into how migrant religious communities experience and negotiate belonging through the interplay of religion, emotion, and migration, and how these processes shape their relationships to national belonging and its boundaries. This Special Issue addresses this intersection by examining the emotional politics surrounding religious communities in contexts of migration. Its central premise is that emotions do not merely accompany migration and religious identification; they actively participate in producing, maintaining, contesting, and spatializing the boundaries of national belonging. Approaching emotion in this way shifts attention from what migrants feel to what emotions do: how they generate attachments and solidarities, invest places and communities with meaning, sustain collective memories, and shape experiences of inclusion, exclusion, recognition, and estrangement. This perspective also foregrounds the spatial dimensions of emotional politics. Global migration transforms not only cultural and religious practices but also the emotional landscapes through which individuals and communities understand their place within societies. Within these emotional landscapes, the Special Issue therefore pays particular attention to emotional geographies: the ways in which spaces, places, mobility, and displacement become emotionally invested and acquire social and political meaning. Sacred spaces, neighbourhoods, homelands, places of settlement, and transnational networks may become sites through which religious communities in contexts of migration sustain memories and attachments, negotiate inclusion and exclusion, and position themselves in relation to national communities and their symbolic boundaries. Building on existing scholarship in National Identities on emotional diasporas and ethnoreligious identities, this Special Issue brings these two strands of scholarship into dialogue by asking how migration reshapes the emotional experience of religious belonging and how, in turn, religiously inflected emotions shape migrants’ negotiations of national belonging. Its contribution lies in approaching emotions not simply as consequences of migration or expressions of identity, but as forces through which boundaries of national belonging are made, experienced, reproduced, and challenged. This perspective enables the Special Issue to connect everyday emotional experiences with broader questions of collective identity, spatial attachment, and national inclusion and exclusion. Contributors are encouraged, where relevant, to situate their work in dialogue with this existing scholarship.
II. Themes and Scope 
This Special Issue welcomes interdisciplinary contributions examining the intersections of emotion, religion, migration, and national belonging. Relevant fields include migration studies, the sociology and anthropology of religion, the sociology and anthropology of emotions, identity studies, media and communication studies, gender studies, and related interdisciplinary areas. Contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Emotional narratives, identity formation, and belonging: This theme invites papers examining how emotional narratives and storytelling shape religious and cultural self
  understandings among migrant communities. Contributions might explore how emotions embedded in memories, testimonies, everyday narratives, or collective histories generate attachments to religious, diasporic, local, or national communities. Of particular interest is how such narratives position religious communities in contexts of migration in relation to national belonging and how they contribute to reproducing, negotiating, or challenging symbolic boundaries between belonging and non-belonging.
• Emotional landscapes of gender, generation, and belonging: This theme invites papers exploring how gender, age, generation, and family roles shape the emotional and spatial experiences of religious communities in contexts of migration. Particular attention may be given to intergenerational religious transmission, changing family relations, everyday practices of inclusion and exclusion, and the ways in which differently positioned community members experience, reproduce, negotiate, or contest the spatial and symbolic boundaries of national belonging.
• Media, representation, and the circulation of public emotions: This theme invites papers examining how religious communities in contexts of migration are represented—and represent themselves—through traditional and digital media, and how such representations generate, circulate, and contest public emotions. Contributions may consider how emotions become attached to religious communities and shape public understandings of their place within the nation. Papers may also explore how religious actors use digital and transnational media to construct counter-narratives, negotiate visibility, maintain collective memories, and challenge or reconfigure dominant boundaries of national belonging.
• Transnational connections, emotional attachments, and solidarities: This theme invites papers exploring how religious communities in contexts of migration develop and sustain emotional attachments across national borders through shared rituals, transnational kinship, virtual religious gatherings, collective memories, religious institutions, and other cross-border practices. Contributions may examine how these connections generate solidarity and emotional resilience, but also tensions, ambivalence, or competing attachments. Contributions might further consider how transnational religious and emotional ties interact with national belonging in countries of settlement, including the ways in which they may reinforce, complicate, negotiate, or contest boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.