The TAKHAYYUL (StG 2019, 853210) project is led by Dr Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu and is funded by the European Research Council. 

The interdisciplinary team part of the research will develop an extensive and comparative formulation of a theory of imagination, takhayyul. Researchers in our team focus on a range of historical and aesthetic elements that shape and connect the political imaginaries of political aspirations in eleven countries: Bosnia-Herzegovina Kosovo, North Macedonia, Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Bangladesh, India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The interconnected imaginaries provide its followers with a wide range of religious cosmologies, nationalist feelings and other affective and imaginative registers.

This project seeks to contribute to global prosperity by offering a fresh perspective that does not reproduce the tropes on irrationality. Instead, it is designed to provide a sound theoretical ground upon which to delineate the ways populist forms of religious politics forge imaginative landscapes beyond the borders of nation-states.