8. Laicite; Caveats of Assimilation

In an era where Western societies are on increasingly shaky ground with diverse groups of minorities calling for inclusion, France's definition, and enforcement, of secularism as a solution has drawn international attention.

Patrice Brodeur is a Professor at the Institute of Religious Studies at the University of Montreal. His work investigates the dynamics of power and multiple identities within intercultural, interreligious, intercivilizational, and interworldview dialogues. He recently founded a social entrepreneurship NGO called InterWorldView to improve the transformative capacities of peace builders worldwide. Brodeur’s most recent book, co-authored with Dr. Ina Merdjanova, is Religion as a Conversation Starter: Interreligious Dialogue for Peacebuilding in the Balkans, 1990-2008 (Continuum Press, 2009; paperback 2011).

Mame-Fatou Niangis an associate professor of French at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, author of Identités Françaises: Banlieues, féminités et universalisme (2019) and co-director, with Kaytie Nielsen, of the film Mariannes Noires: Une Mosaïques Afropéenne, a plural portrait of seven Black French women. 

Karim Mahmoud-Vintam is the founder and CEO of Cités d'Or, an organization and civic movement whose mission is to educate at-risk young adults in citizenship, envisioned and practiced as a secular spirituality. His most recent book is France is dead, long live France: For a second French revolution (Editions Marie B., 2017).