Commenter on Panel: Sacred Space and Tolerance – Thursday, January 21 (11am – 1pm PST // 2pm – 4pm EST)

Anna Elisabetta Galeottiis Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Eastern Piedmont, Vercelli. She has written many articles on religion, multiculturalism and liberal political theory. Her first book, Toleration as Recognition from 2002, argues that tensions within liberal political theory over freedoms granted to religious individuals and minority groups can be ameliorated by an approach that considers toleration as a form of recognition of group difference. This framework would address the unique discrimination faced by members of minority cultural and religious groups, which mainstream liberal theory often overlooks. She has pursued this approach in subsequent articles, including “Toleration and Purpose-Built Mosques: Contestations in Contemporary Europe” in How Groups Matter from 2014. In that essay she describes how contemporary opposition to the construction of Mosques represents an aversion to cultural difference, which can only be justified in mainstream political discourse by teth application of a general religious identity, in this case “Muslim.” This term obscures differences among immigrant communities, and this debate, Galeotti argues, illustrates the importance of public space in political contests over minority cultural and religious groups.     

Example of published work:

Anna Elisabetta Galeotti, “Toleration and Purpose-Built Mosques: Contestations in Contemporary Europe,” in How Groups Matter: Challenges of Toleration in Pluralistic Societies, ed. Gideon Calder, Magali Bessone, and Federico Zuolo (London: Routledge, 2014);