Dr A. Sophie Lauwers
IASH-Alwaleed Postdoctoral Fellow, October 2025 - July 2026
A. Sophie Lauwers is a political philosopher whose work focuses on secularism, Christian privilege, racial and religious inequality, epistemic justice, and multiculturalism. Before joining IASH at the University of Edinburgh in October 2025, Sophie was a postdoctoral researcher and teaching fellow at KU Leuven in Belgium. She was also a teaching fellow at the University of Aberdeen, where she completed her PhD in Philosophy in 2023 as part of the interdisciplinary Marie Skłodowska-Curie POLITICO project. Her thesis investigated how current models of political secularism contribute to secular and Christian hegemony in contemporary Europe, and proposed a new model of political secularism. Based on this research, she is now writing a monograph on political secularism and hegemony.
Sophie’s research aims to bring together insights from critical secularism studies and normative political theory, and has been published in journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, Ethnicities and Critical Philosophy of Race. She has also taught a wide range of courses, including in introductory ethics, political philosophy, recognition theory, and race, religion, and secularism.
Project title: Islam, National Identity and the State: Rethinking the Politics of Recognition
Policymakers, politicians and civil society actors in Western Europe increasingly advocate state support for national religious heritage. This ‘post-secular nationalism’ predominantly assumes and supports a singular cultural Christian heritage, often (although not always) in opposition to minorities, and especially Muslims, as ethnoreligious ‘Other’. This problematically suggests that those minorities do not belong to or are even incompatible with national culture. In response, a small but growing group of normative political theorists proposes to extend public state recognition to religious minorities as part of national identity. At the same time, in critical religion- and secularism studies, state recognition of minorities has been heavily criticized: it is seen as essentialist, reifying majority-minority dynamics and functioning as a tool for governmentality. Focusing in particular on Islam in Western Europe, this project will investigate to what extent those criticisms apply to multiculturalist proposals, and how political theory can incorporate them in a critical politics of recognition.