Religious Encounters and Creative Practice
About us
Join us for an inspiring, in-person event that brings together faith, creativity, and dialogue.
Interreligious Encounters and Creative Practice is an interdisciplinary event exploring how creative practices shape, challenge, and reimagine encounters and forms of coexistence between different faiths. Open to both academic audiences and wider communities, the event invites contributors to reflect on the potential of creative media to interrogate dominant models of religious difference and to offer new perspectives on the lived realities of interreligious interaction, particularly in sacred and contested spaces.
Organised by the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University, Religions for Peace UK, and the University of Edinburgh (Social Anthropology & the Alwaleed Centre), the event aims to strengthen connections across architecture, social anthropology, art, film, performance, cultural landscape studies, and related fields. It builds on an initiative developed at Newcastle University in close collaboration with Religions for Peace UK, as part of the broader project Religious Coexistence: Embodied Interactions in Sacred Sites and Faith Practices. The first symposium in this series was held at Newcastle University in January 2025.
The Edinburgh 2026 event includes:
- A symposium
- 19–21 January 2026
- Informatics Forum, University of Edinburgh
- 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB
Organisers
The symposium is organised by Dr Christos Kakalis (SAPL), Dr George Tsourous (SAPL) and Dr Giulia Liberatore (Social Anthropology and Islamic & Middle Eastern Studies, The University of Edinburgh).
Venue
19 - 21 January 2026: Symposium on 'Interreligious Encounters and Creative Practice', Panel Discussions and 2 Artistic Installations / Performances [Real Time] to be held at: Room G.07, Informatics Forum [G.07/A - Informatics Forum - Event Venue Hire - Tagvenue.com], Address: 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB.
19 January 2026 - 30 January 2026: International Exhibition 'Interreligious Encounters & Creative Practice' to be held at the Auditorium of the Interfaith Chaplaincy of the University of Edinburgh, Address: 1 Bristol Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9AL.
2 February 2026 - 19 February 2026: International Exhibition 'Interreligious Encounters & Creative Practice' to move to Chrystal Macmillan Building Foyer, Address: 15a George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD.
This event is kindly funded by Religions for Peace UK, part of the international Religions for Peace Movement which has over 90 affiliated national bodies. Their initiatives identify with the UN Sustainable Development Goals in order to weave peaceful coexistence amongst local, regional and local faith actors.