Markha Valenta is a scholar, teacher and publicist, whose work has centred on issues related to religion, democracy, cities and globalization. He focuses in particular on developments in the Netherlands, the United States and India – three secular democracies with long traditions of pluralism, globalism and religious conflict. He most often goes to work by looking closely at controversies related to property, bodies, buildings, clothing, sexuality, and animals – and how their material form is used to give shape to rather intangible ideals and aspirations ranging from the divine to secular notions of justice, freedom, equality and community.

The most basic question of Markha’s work is: how do we need to change the concepts, questions and frameworks we have (as these were developed in other periods and contexts) to effectively respond to the changes taking place in our world today? His most basic argument relates to the question of justice, arguing that today national citizenship is one of the most egregious forms of injustice we face because it is so dependent on chance, descent and biology. Different national identities, guarantee or fail to guarantee our not only our chances to live and thrive, but quite simply our chances to live. Redressing this inequality requires that we shift from citizenship as a form of inherited property and local privilege to citizenship as a form of multi-sited civic identity & political relation, cut loose from biology & happenstance.

His questions, thinking and writing have developed in an ‘Atlantic’ context (Austrian/French/American/Dutch) – mostly at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences – with regular forays into public debate & and a few into performance art.