Hayward Alker Best Student Paper Award Winner 2016: Tanya Schwarz, for “Inter-Religious Peace-building: Engaging Religious Diversity in Faith Based Organizations”

Winner: Tanya Schwarz (UC Irvine), for “Inter-Religious Peace-building: Engaging Religious Diversity in Faith Based Organizations,” presented at the meeting of the American Political Science Association, 2015.

Tanya Schwarz’s paper “Inter-Religious Peace-building: Engaging Religious Diversity in Faith Based Organizations” considers how transnational faith-based organizations (FBO) that work in peace-building and reconciliation spheres conceive of and manage diversity. Through extensive research with two FBOs that included conducting interviews, engaging in participant observations, and collecting texts, Schwarz uncovers the terms, concepts and meanings the two organizations use to describe and distinguish themselves from other similar FBOs and to inform their strategies and practices for engaging with religious diversity. Her interpretive research thus indicates that religious pluralism—the dominant explanatory and normative framework—may be limited in its ability to meaningfully mitigate salient differences due to its reliance on dialogue. Instead, this work indicates alternative models for inter-religious engagement that rely on prayer, communal work, and other (non-dialogic) practices.

Award committee:

Samantha Majic, chair

Leila Kawar

Jarrod Hayes