This site provides brief, accessible segments of video and textual material from a series of workshops on religion in civil society. These workshops involved both academic experts and leaders of international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that provide humanitarian aid and services in Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East. These free-wheeling and interactive workshops were held from 2008 to 2012 in Buenos Aires, Delhi, Cairo, and Santa Barbara. They identified the role of religion in the recent socio-political changes in each of these regions, and the way that religion has been both a help and a hindrance in the operations of international humanitarian organizations.

 

To make this material easy to access and use, the video clips are only a few minutes long, and the textual copy is mostly in one-paragraph units. These video and textual units are organized both by general issue (eg the role of religion in social change, or the impact of religion on humanitarian relief work) as well as by area of the world (such as Latin America or the Middle East), with some additional material related to other areas and to the topic as a whole. This is open access material, meaning that anyone accessing this website is free to download and use the video and textual material for any nonprofit purpose, including for educational and NGO-related activities, as long as the sponsors are credited (the Luce Foundation and the Orfalea Center at UCSB). Anyone interested in using the material for profit purposes should contact the Orfalea Center.

 

This project is sponsored by the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and funded by a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.