The Milwaukee Pluralism Project is a research-teaching project that seeks to document the changing religious landscape of Milwaukee, to examine the implications of this new religious demography for urban communities across the US, and to give students the opportunity to engage in meaningful reflection on these emerging issues both through primary research and in classroom contexts. The increasingly transcultural and translocal circulation of religious people and ideas requires members of society who have thought about its implications. While it is obvious that the truth claims of religious people sometimes contradict each other in painful ways, the study of pluralism involves not only the study of conflict and diversity but also of the inter-religious dialogues and relationships developing among religious communities and individuals.

The Milwaukee project is linked to the on-going national Pluralism Project developed at Harvard University, which carries out research and education on pluralism through a model of student-led research. Through involvement in seminars and research internships, students at UW-Milwaukee carry out primary research on religious demography, to be incorporated into the national database at Harvard, and conduct in-depth studies of religious communities. Information from these studies will be electronically published on our web site and will serve as case studies for the teaching of undergraduate courses on global religions and religious pluralism.

Courses and student research opportunities as part of the Milwaukee Pluralism Project are jointly offered through the Department of History, the Comparative Study of Religion Program, and the Cultures & Communities program at UW-Milwaukee.

The aims of the Milwaukee Pluralism Project are three-fold:

1) To educate Milwaukee students in understanding the increasingly diverse and plural nature of their own and global religious communities in the 21st century;

2) To map the post-1965 religious demography of Milwaukee, engaging students in meaningful research on their own community and on the changing nature of American religious life;

3) To engage with and share understandings of religiously plural Milwaukee with members of the Milwaukee community through: a network of guest speakers and field trips for related courses, student dialogue with members of religious groups, the creation of a Milwaukee Pluralism Project Web Site to share on-going findings, and the publication of an electronic volume on the religious landscape of Milwaukee.

All research connected with the Milwaukee Pluralism Project is undertaken in accordance with IRB protocol for the ethical conduct of research on human subjects.