Amélie Barras
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 145357 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Amélie Barras |
| NOMBRES | Amélie |
| APELLIDO | Barras |
| FIRMA | BARRAS A |
| AFILIACIONES | York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2226-9126 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 21 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 50 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 21 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2009 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Privilège et migration
La migration des citoyens français vers le Canada est en forte croissance depuis les années 2000. Les Français constituent désormais le principal groupe migratoire au Québec et un groupe important ailleurs au Canada. Pourtant, cette migration demeure peu étudiée. Cet article se penche sur, d’une part, les politiques publiques qui facilitent cette migration dite « invisible » d’une population majoritairement blanche, diplômée et non religieuse, et…
Canadian Catholic Health Care at the Nexus of Multiple Legal Regimes
What does it mean to be a public Catholic institution in Canada? How does this Catholic identity evolve with the secularisation and diversification of society, and with the rising awareness of the complicated legacy of Catholicism and colonisation in Canada? This article explores those questions drawing on document analysis and interviews with staff working in Catholic health care. Taking a legal pluralist approach, it documents how Catholic heal…
Appels alternés entre la liberté d'expression et la liberté de la religion
This article analyses how arguments in Canadian newspaper op eds that promote the freedom of expression can serve as conduits for Islamophobia. To reflect on this slippage, we compare opinion pieces in five English-language daily newspapers on 2019's Law 21 in Québec, and discussions surrounding Motion 103 in 2017, and the appointment of Amira Elghawaby as Canada's Special Representative on Islamophobia in 2023. We show how 'freedom of religion' …
Quebecois Laïcité and Its Canadian Multicultural Other in the Debates Surrounding Law 21
Secularism has long been employed by states to signal their emancipation from “religion,” itself often positioned as unmodern and undemocratic. In this paper, we examine the ways in which secularism is understood in contemporary debates in Quebec. While secularism is typically employed to regulate religion, often with a focus on Islam, we show that with An Act Respecting the Laicity of the State (2019) its usage is mobilised to articulate the dis…
Commentary on Urban Secularism
This article offers critical and complementary commentary on the new book Urban Secularism: Negotiating Religious Diversity in Europe by Julia Martínez-Ariño
Formalizing Secularism as a Regime of Restrictions and Protections
In 2019, the province of Quebec and the canton of Geneva passed bills establishing their states as “secular.” While each law is, to a certain extent, context specific, both present noteworthy similarities. First, neutrality (the cornerstone of laïcité ) is articulated around two elements: (1) restrictions that affect the religious practices of public servants belonging to minority religions and (2) protections for Christian symbols constructed as…
Gazing into the World of Tattoos
Debates around the visibility of religious symbols - including whether and how to regulate them-have been quite vivid in recent years in Canada, and particularly in the province of Quebec. These discussions often focus on minority religious symbols and are based on the premise that symbols can be removed or modified. In fact, Saba Mahmood (2006, 2009) argues that using the term "symbol" precludes de-facto our ability to entertain the possibility …
L’angle mort de la « laïcité ouverte »
Building on our critiques of the reasonable accommodation of religious minorities in Canada (see Selby et al., 2018a ; Beaman, 2017 ; Barras, 2016), this paper argues for attention to processes as intrinsic to everyday interactions of religiosity (following Tully, 1995, 2000 ; Van Quaquebeke et al., 2007). We contend that frameworks like Maclure and Taylor’s (2010) on ‘open’ and ‘closed’ secularism are useful for nation state comparison, but inef…
Beyond Accommodation
Problems – of integration, failed political participation, and requests for various kinds of accommodation – seem to dominate the research on minority Muslims in Western nations. Beyond Accommodation offers a different perspective, showing how Muslim Canadians successfully navigate and negotiate their religiosity in the more mundane moments of their lives. Drawing on interviews with Muslims in Montreal and St. John’s, Selby, Barras, and Beaman ex…
Rethinking Canadian Discourses of “Reasonable Accommodation”
This article maps the repercussions of the use of reasonable accommodation, a recent framework referenced inside and outside Canadian courtrooms to respond to religiously framed differences. Drawing on three cases from Ontario and Quebec, we trace how the notion of reasonable accommodation—now invoked by the media and in public discourse—has moved beyond its initial legal moorings. After outlining the cases, we critique the framework with attenti…
Travelogue of secularism
Recent works have invited us to look into how modes of secularism influence the shape of ‘modern’ religion. This literature has remained quite state-centred, paying less attention to how concepts of secularism migrate from one national context to another. This article seeks to investigate these transnational dynamics. More specifically, it aims to explore this process of travelling through the contemporary writings of the Quebec-based essayist Dj…
Le Terroriste, l'Homme éclairé et le Patriarche
Les personnes de confession musulmane en général et les femmes musulmanes en particulier - plus encore celles d'entre elles installées en Occident -, se trouvent face à une situation délicate : elles sont quotidiennement confrontées à des figures hégémoniques. Dans cet article, nous examinons comment ces figures affectent la vie de nos participantes musulmanes canadiennes, et comment ces mêmes figures délimitent, dans une certaine mesure, les dis…
Excavating the political weaved through religious freedom
France citizenship in the aftermath of 2015
Over the last decade, France has put in place a series of measures to reinforce laïcité and Republican values. While these notions have never clearly been defined, they have been used as a justification to scrutinize and interfere in the bodies, sensibilities and practices of ‘Muslim’ citizens. In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015 and the November 13th terrorist attacks that same year, these policies have become ever more…
Exploring the intricacies and dissonances of religious governance
This article interrogates the extent to which institutional discourses on the governance of religious minorities are useful to think about the complexity of how religion gets negotiated in the quotidian. It takes as its starting point the exploration of the discourse on religious governance in the province of Quebec organized around the notion of request for accommodations. Through an analysis of public policy documents, it examines facets of thi…
Refashioning Secularisms in France and Turkey
Over the past few years, secularism has become an intrinsic component of discussions on religious freedom and religious governance. The question of whether states should restrict the wearing of headscarves and other religious symbols has been particularly critical in guiding this thought process. Refashioning Secularisms in France and Turkey documents how, in both countries, devout women have contested bans on headscarves, pointing to how these a…
The safety of authenticity
The article explores how the concept of authenticity is deployed in contemporary Switzerland to delimit not only the representational boundaries of the Muslim (foreign) ‘other’, but also of the dominant cultural self. The authors analyse the act of constituting the authentic other in relation to the stability, comfort and safeness of the dialogically constituted authentic self, as illustrated in a Swiss advertising campaign in summer 2009. To inv…
Sacred Laïcité and the Politics of Religious Resurgence in France
This article contributes to the current scholarly discussion by inviting us to look at secularism not as a static model of religious governance, but as a formation that shifts with time and that is deeply related to our contemporary understanding of religion. As such, it investigates the recent transformations of French secularism. In 2004 France passed a law banning visible religious symbols in public schools. Since then French secularism has in…
Transnational Understandings of Secularisms and Their Impact on the Right to Religious Freedom—Exploring Religious Symbols Cases at the UN and ECHR
Drawing on a theoretical approach that understands secularism to be an authoritative discourse that shapes the boundaries of the religiously acceptable in a modern nation-state, this article explores the usage by international human rights bodies (United Nations bodies and European Court of Human Rights) of secularism in religious freedom cases. More specifically, the article investigates how, while both those bodies ground their rulings and opin…
Contemporary Laïcité
Over recent decades, France has had to deal with the growing presence of immigrants from its ex‐colonies – a phenomenon that has been affecting many former colonial powers and accentuated by globalisation. Starting in the late 1980s, this presence translated itself, among other things, through an increased visibility of Islam. For instance, numbers of second‐ and third‐generation Muslim women, primarily of North African origin, have been expressi…
A rights-based discourse to contest the boundaries of state secularism? The case of the headscarf bans in France and Turkey
For the last two decades the human rights discourse has been increasingly used across the world – one could argue that there has even been a globalization of human rights. This discourse has also been intrinsically linked to positivism, enlightenment and secularism. It is with this in mind that this article looks at how religious Muslim individuals and groups in France and Turkey have been appropriating the human rights discourse and its national…
A rights-based discourse to contest the boundaries of state secularism? The case of the headscarf bans in France and Turkey
For the last two decades the human rights discourse has been increasingly used across the world – one could argue that there has even been a globalization of human rights. This discourse has also been intrinsically linked to positivism, enlightenment and secularism. It is with this in mind that this article looks at how religious Muslim individuals and groups in France and Turkey have been appropriating the human rights discourse and its national…
Sacred Laïcité and the Politics of Religious Resurgence in France
This article contributes to the current scholarly discussion by inviting us to look at secularism not as a static model of religious governance, but as a formation that shifts with time and that is deeply related to our contemporary understanding of religion. As such, it investigates the recent transformations of French secularism. In 2004 France passed a law banning visible religious symbols in public schools. Since then French secularism has in…
Gazing into the World of Tattoos
Debates around the visibility of religious symbols - including whether and how to regulate them-have been quite vivid in recent years in Canada, and particularly in the province of Quebec. These discussions often focus on minority religious symbols and are based on the premise that symbols can be removed or modified. In fact, Saba Mahmood (2006, 2009) argues that using the term "symbol" precludes de-facto our ability to entertain the possibility …
Le Terroriste, l'Homme éclairé et le Patriarche
Les personnes de confession musulmane en général et les femmes musulmanes en particulier - plus encore celles d'entre elles installées en Occident -, se trouvent face à une situation délicate : elles sont quotidiennement confrontées à des figures hégémoniques. Dans cet article, nous examinons comment ces figures affectent la vie de nos participantes musulmanes canadiennes, et comment ces mêmes figures délimitent, dans une certaine mesure, les dis…
Exploring the intricacies and dissonances of religious governance
This article interrogates the extent to which institutional discourses on the governance of religious minorities are useful to think about the complexity of how religion gets negotiated in the quotidian. It takes as its starting point the exploration of the discourse on religious governance in the province of Quebec organized around the notion of request for accommodations. Through an analysis of public policy documents, it examines facets of thi…
Rethinking Canadian Discourses of “Reasonable Accommodation”
This article maps the repercussions of the use of reasonable accommodation, a recent framework referenced inside and outside Canadian courtrooms to respond to religiously framed differences. Drawing on three cases from Ontario and Quebec, we trace how the notion of reasonable accommodation—now invoked by the media and in public discourse—has moved beyond its initial legal moorings. After outlining the cases, we critique the framework with attenti…
Transnational Understandings of Secularisms and Their Impact on the Right to Religious Freedom—Exploring Religious Symbols Cases at the UN and ECHR
Drawing on a theoretical approach that understands secularism to be an authoritative discourse that shapes the boundaries of the religiously acceptable in a modern nation-state, this article explores the usage by international human rights bodies (United Nations bodies and European Court of Human Rights) of secularism in religious freedom cases. More specifically, the article investigates how, while both those bodies ground their rulings and opin…
Quebecois Laïcité and Its Canadian Multicultural Other in the Debates Surrounding Law 21
Secularism has long been employed by states to signal their emancipation from “religion,” itself often positioned as unmodern and undemocratic. In this paper, we examine the ways in which secularism is understood in contemporary debates in Quebec. While secularism is typically employed to regulate religion, often with a focus on Islam, we show that with An Act Respecting the Laicity of the State (2019) its usage is mobilised to articulate the dis…
Travelogue of secularism
Recent works have invited us to look into how modes of secularism influence the shape of ‘modern’ religion. This literature has remained quite state-centred, paying less attention to how concepts of secularism migrate from one national context to another. This article seeks to investigate these transnational dynamics. More specifically, it aims to explore this process of travelling through the contemporary writings of the Quebec-based essayist Dj…
France citizenship in the aftermath of 2015
Over the last decade, France has put in place a series of measures to reinforce laïcité and Republican values. While these notions have never clearly been defined, they have been used as a justification to scrutinize and interfere in the bodies, sensibilities and practices of ‘Muslim’ citizens. In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015 and the November 13th terrorist attacks that same year, these policies have become ever more…
Formalizing Secularism as a Regime of Restrictions and Protections
In 2019, the province of Quebec and the canton of Geneva passed bills establishing their states as “secular.” While each law is, to a certain extent, context specific, both present noteworthy similarities. First, neutrality (the cornerstone of laïcité ) is articulated around two elements: (1) restrictions that affect the religious practices of public servants belonging to minority religions and (2) protections for Christian symbols constructed as…
A rights-based discourse to contest the boundaries of state secularism? The case of the headscarf bans in France and Turkey
For the last two decades the human rights discourse has been increasingly used across the world – one could argue that there has even been a globalization of human rights. This discourse has also been intrinsically linked to positivism, enlightenment and secularism. It is with this in mind that this article looks at how religious Muslim individuals and groups in France and Turkey have been appropriating the human rights discourse and its national…
Contemporary Laïcité
Over recent decades, France has had to deal with the growing presence of immigrants from its ex‐colonies – a phenomenon that has been affecting many former colonial powers and accentuated by globalisation. Starting in the late 1980s, this presence translated itself, among other things, through an increased visibility of Islam. For instance, numbers of second‐ and third‐generation Muslim women, primarily of North African origin, have been expressi…
Transnational Understandings of Secularisms and Their Impact on the Right to Religious Freedom—Exploring Religious Symbols Cases at the UN and ECHR
Drawing on a theoretical approach that understands secularism to be an authoritative discourse that shapes the boundaries of the religiously acceptable in a modern nation-state, this article explores the usage by international human rights bodies (United Nations bodies and European Court of Human Rights) of secularism in religious freedom cases. More specifically, the article investigates how, while both those bodies ground their rulings and opin…
The safety of authenticity
The article explores how the concept of authenticity is deployed in contemporary Switzerland to delimit not only the representational boundaries of the Muslim (foreign) ‘other’, but also of the dominant cultural self. The authors analyse the act of constituting the authentic other in relation to the stability, comfort and safeness of the dialogically constituted authentic self, as illustrated in a Swiss advertising campaign in summer 2009. To inv…
Sacred Laïcité and the Politics of Religious Resurgence in France
This article contributes to the current scholarly discussion by inviting us to look at secularism not as a static model of religious governance, but as a formation that shifts with time and that is deeply related to our contemporary understanding of religion. As such, it investigates the recent transformations of French secularism. In 2004 France passed a law banning visible religious symbols in public schools. Since then French secularism has in…
Refashioning Secularisms in France and Turkey
Over the past few years, secularism has become an intrinsic component of discussions on religious freedom and religious governance. The question of whether states should restrict the wearing of headscarves and other religious symbols has been particularly critical in guiding this thought process. Refashioning Secularisms in France and Turkey documents how, in both countries, devout women have contested bans on headscarves, pointing to how these a…
Exploring the intricacies and dissonances of religious governance
This article interrogates the extent to which institutional discourses on the governance of religious minorities are useful to think about the complexity of how religion gets negotiated in the quotidian. It takes as its starting point the exploration of the discourse on religious governance in the province of Quebec organized around the notion of request for accommodations. Through an analysis of public policy documents, it examines facets of thi…
Excavating the political weaved through religious freedom
France citizenship in the aftermath of 2015
Over the last decade, France has put in place a series of measures to reinforce laïcité and Republican values. While these notions have never clearly been defined, they have been used as a justification to scrutinize and interfere in the bodies, sensibilities and practices of ‘Muslim’ citizens. In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015 and the November 13th terrorist attacks that same year, these policies have become ever more…
Beyond Accommodation
Problems – of integration, failed political participation, and requests for various kinds of accommodation – seem to dominate the research on minority Muslims in Western nations. Beyond Accommodation offers a different perspective, showing how Muslim Canadians successfully navigate and negotiate their religiosity in the more mundane moments of their lives. Drawing on interviews with Muslims in Montreal and St. John’s, Selby, Barras, and Beaman ex…
Rethinking Canadian Discourses of “Reasonable Accommodation”
This article maps the repercussions of the use of reasonable accommodation, a recent framework referenced inside and outside Canadian courtrooms to respond to religiously framed differences. Drawing on three cases from Ontario and Quebec, we trace how the notion of reasonable accommodation—now invoked by the media and in public discourse—has moved beyond its initial legal moorings. After outlining the cases, we critique the framework with attenti…
Travelogue of secularism
Recent works have invited us to look into how modes of secularism influence the shape of ‘modern’ religion. This literature has remained quite state-centred, paying less attention to how concepts of secularism migrate from one national context to another. This article seeks to investigate these transnational dynamics. More specifically, it aims to explore this process of travelling through the contemporary writings of the Quebec-based essayist Dj…
Le Terroriste, l'Homme éclairé et le Patriarche
Les personnes de confession musulmane en général et les femmes musulmanes en particulier - plus encore celles d'entre elles installées en Occident -, se trouvent face à une situation délicate : elles sont quotidiennement confrontées à des figures hégémoniques. Dans cet article, nous examinons comment ces figures affectent la vie de nos participantes musulmanes canadiennes, et comment ces mêmes figures délimitent, dans une certaine mesure, les dis…
L’angle mort de la « laïcité ouverte »
Building on our critiques of the reasonable accommodation of religious minorities in Canada (see Selby et al., 2018a ; Beaman, 2017 ; Barras, 2016), this paper argues for attention to processes as intrinsic to everyday interactions of religiosity (following Tully, 1995, 2000 ; Van Quaquebeke et al., 2007). We contend that frameworks like Maclure and Taylor’s (2010) on ‘open’ and ‘closed’ secularism are useful for nation state comparison, but inef…
Formalizing Secularism as a Regime of Restrictions and Protections
In 2019, the province of Quebec and the canton of Geneva passed bills establishing their states as “secular.” While each law is, to a certain extent, context specific, both present noteworthy similarities. First, neutrality (the cornerstone of laïcité ) is articulated around two elements: (1) restrictions that affect the religious practices of public servants belonging to minority religions and (2) protections for Christian symbols constructed as…
Gazing into the World of Tattoos
Debates around the visibility of religious symbols - including whether and how to regulate them-have been quite vivid in recent years in Canada, and particularly in the province of Quebec. These discussions often focus on minority religious symbols and are based on the premise that symbols can be removed or modified. In fact, Saba Mahmood (2006, 2009) argues that using the term "symbol" precludes de-facto our ability to entertain the possibility …
Commentary on Urban Secularism
This article offers critical and complementary commentary on the new book Urban Secularism: Negotiating Religious Diversity in Europe by Julia Martínez-Ariño
Quebecois Laïcité and Its Canadian Multicultural Other in the Debates Surrounding Law 21
Secularism has long been employed by states to signal their emancipation from “religion,” itself often positioned as unmodern and undemocratic. In this paper, we examine the ways in which secularism is understood in contemporary debates in Quebec. While secularism is typically employed to regulate religion, often with a focus on Islam, we show that with An Act Respecting the Laicity of the State (2019) its usage is mobilised to articulate the dis…
Canadian Catholic Health Care at the Nexus of Multiple Legal Regimes
What does it mean to be a public Catholic institution in Canada? How does this Catholic identity evolve with the secularisation and diversification of society, and with the rising awareness of the complicated legacy of Catholicism and colonisation in Canada? This article explores those questions drawing on document analysis and interviews with staff working in Catholic health care. Taking a legal pluralist approach, it documents how Catholic heal…
Appels alternés entre la liberté d'expression et la liberté de la religion
This article analyses how arguments in Canadian newspaper op eds that promote the freedom of expression can serve as conduits for Islamophobia. To reflect on this slippage, we compare opinion pieces in five English-language daily newspapers on 2019's Law 21 in Québec, and discussions surrounding Motion 103 in 2017, and the appointment of Amira Elghawaby as Canada's Special Representative on Islamophobia in 2023. We show how 'freedom of religion' …
Privilège et migration
La migration des citoyens français vers le Canada est en forte croissance depuis les années 2000. Les Français constituent désormais le principal groupe migratoire au Québec et un groupe important ailleurs au Canada. Pourtant, cette migration demeure peu étudiée. Cet article se penche sur, d’une part, les politiques publiques qui facilitent cette migration dite « invisible » d’une population majoritairement blanche, diplômée et non religieuse, et…
Political science (18 obras) · Law (16 obras) · Sociology (16 obras) · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender (12 obras) · Philosophy (12 obras) · Politics (12 obras) · Religion, Society, and Development (12 obras) · Law (11 obras) · Religion and Society Interactions (10 obras) · Secularism (9 obras)