This session investigates the intersections of transcultural theory, recognition, and moral theological formation in contemporary migration. Utilizing philosophy, ethnography, and theology, contributors examine how religious communities shape migrant agency amidst mobility and inequality. The panel first explores transculturalism through recognition theory, analyzing how belonging is negotiated—and sometimes contested—within religious spaces. A moral-theological critique follows, centering on African Pentecostalism; it challenges the “sanctification” of mass emigration and proposes alternative frameworks that value local presence and resistance. Finally, ethnographic studies of Ghanaian migrants in Australia and transit migrants elsewhere illustrate how religious discourses serve as “knowledge systems” to contest marginalization. By framing transcultural religion as a site of active moral and political negotiation, this session moves beyond neutral cultural descriptions. Instead, it highlights how recognition and resistance are formed within the “Third Space” of migration, offering new insights into the spiritual and social landscapes of global diasporas.
The dominant narrative within migration studies often focuses on the linear journey toward a final destination, often overlooking the liminal existence of transit migrants—those who are stuck in an unfamiliar place with nowhere to go and no possibility of returning home. Drawing from Homi Bhabha’s concept of sly civility and James Scott’s notion of hidden transcripts, I argue that transit migrants are not passive victims but agents of resistance. This paper explores how transit migrants negotiate power and enact resistance within a liminal temporality. Their existence, and their split identity, offer a vivid challenge to the system that renders them invisible. Aware of their powerlessness, their resistance often takes subtle forms. These indirect acts of resistance become vehicles of critique used by the powerless while allowing them to remain anonymous.
This paper examines how Ghanaian Pentecostal migrants in Sydney generate transcultural religious discourses that negotiate belonging, contest racialized marginalization, and reframe their presence in Australia as spiritually purposeful. Drawing on long‑term ethnographic fieldwork (2014–2023) with the Sydney branch of the Church of Pentecost International Australia Incorporated (CoPIAI), the paper argues that migration catalyzes new cultural and religious formations that exceed national, ethnic, and doctrinal boundaries. Through discursive strategies such as interpreting crises as “Signs of God,” adapting witchcraft narratives to Australian sociopolitical realities, and reconfiguring local Pentecostal prophecies of national revival, migrants construct hybrid identities that bridge Ghanaian cosmologies and Australian contexts. Engaging transcultural theory, discourse analysis, and reverse discourse, the paper demonstrates how migrants creatively retool homeland idioms and hostland imaginaries to produce new moral worlds, ritual practices, and forms of belonging. This case illuminates transculturalism as a lived, embodied process central to African diasporic religious life.
Pentecostalism in Africa has legitimized mass youth emigration from sub-Saharan Africa to the West through special prayer rituals and a triumphalist narrative of reverse mission and kingdom expansion, spiritualizing departure as divine vocation. This paper argues that such a vision reflects a failure of moral-theological formation on a continent whose burgeoning youth demography is the fundamental determinant of its future. Drawing on Nietzsche's critique of Christianity as a "religion of pity" in The Antichrist and Katongole's call for a new Christian social imagination, it contends that Pentecostalism's sanctification of the japa phenomenon dulls the instinct for presence and willful resistance to forces militating against collective flourishing on the African continent. In response, the paper proposes a moral-theological framework that foregrounds the "will to flourish," reclaiming Africa's youth not merely as missionaries elsewhere but as protagonists of an African future: present, resistant, and transformative.
Transculturalism has been discussed mainly from specific cultural, ethnic, and sociopolitical perspectives. This essay will enrich the current discussion by exploring a philosophical theory of transculturality. The essay argues that recognition theory provides a comprehensive framework to further explain the ‘mechanism’ by which the transcultural process shapes migrant identities. Recognition theory assists us in evaluating what might be considered as a positive or successful, rather than a negative or unsuccessful, transcultural process. In addition to exploring the theoretical basis transculturalism, statistical data and lived examples from Canadian immigrant churches are used to show how the proposed theory aligns with actual lived experience.