CMRB Seminars in November

"Blaming the victims - Sarkozy and the plight of the Roma".

Speaker: Dr Jim Wolfreys, Kings College London.

Wednesday 17 November:2-5pm (Room TBC)

“Muslim Women and Marriage in Trans-jurisdictional Contexts”

Wednesday 24 November: 2-5pm in room EB.G.10

Speaker: Dr Prakash Shah, Queen Mary, University of London

How do immigration officials and judges manage when judging the validity of acts of marriage solemnisation, which take place on transjurisdictional terms? How do we explain their responses? These are some questions raised by this paper, which presents evidence gleaned from the writer’s

own work as an ‘expert’ witness in immigration cases. Two case studies have been selected on the basis that the chief issue in contestation is the validity of a trans-jurisdictional marriage among South Asian Muslims, and therefore raise the issue of whether the marriages are valid according

to Muslim law. The paper also raises some questions for future research, given that we know little as yet about how recognition of minority transjurisdictional marriages takes place across European legal systems and, in particular, the role of experts who get involved in the legal processes in which such marriages are contested.

UEL Docklands Campus is adjecent to Cyprus Station, Docklands Light Railway

Centre for Research for Migration, Refugees and Belonging - www.uel.ac.uk/cmrb

Framing Muslims Seminar: 'Islam and Civic Responsibility: the City Circle experience' by Dr Usama Hasan AND 'Resisting Blackness ....

SOAS/UEL Framing Muslims Seminar Series

Framing Muslims: Representation in Culture and Society Post 9/11 - Seminar

Date: Thursday, 27 November 2008
Venue: Room EB.G.18 (University of East London, Docklands Campus)
Time: 5:30-7:00pm

Dr Usama Hasan
'Islam and Civic Responsibility: the City Circle experience'

Dr Usama Hasan is Senior Lecturer in Engineering & Information Sciences at Middlesex University, an imam at Tawhid Mosque in Leyton and Director of the City Circle, a London-based network of Muslim professionals that has been at the forefront of forging an authentic Muslim identity in Britain for the last decade.

Dr Anita Fabos
'Resisting Blackness: Transnational Sudanese Women and Islamic Cultural Space in the Diaspora'

Dr Anita Fabos researches in the areas of ethnicity and race, gender, refugees in urban settings, immigration and naturalization policy, Arab nationalism, and Islam at UEL. She was formerly the Director of the Program in Forced Migration and Refugee Studies and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the American University in Cairo. She has conducted ethnographic research among Muslim Arab Sudanese forced migrants in Cairo, published as 'Brothers' or Others? Gender and Propriety for Muslim Arab Sudanese in Egypt (Berghahn Books). Her current research interests include transnational strategies of women and men in the Sudanese diaspora, livelihoods of urban refugees, and refugee narratives.

Abstract:

This presentation explores the embodied strategies of Arab Muslim Sudanese in Egypt and the United Kingdom within a framework of a 'Muslim diaspora'. It compares discourses of belonging in two distinct socio-legal contexts whereby key elements of Muslim Arab Sudanese identity are performed according to local conditions, taking on different meanings. Egypt and Britain are both familiar to Sudanese through colonial relationships of domination and occupation, and later as locations for study, recreation and exile, but the contemporary legal, political and socio-cultural environments in Britain and Egypt have shaped Sudanese identity in the diaspora in distinctive ways. In Egypt, a Muslim nation with a long history of entanglement with the Muslim Arab people of northern Sudan, Sudanese immigrants and exiles have asserted their superior performance of the shared value of propriety, claimed by both as fundamental to a 'Muslim' and 'Arab' identity. In the UK Sudanese similarly present themselves in morally superior terms, joining other voices in the Muslim diaspora and finding solidarity within an Arab cultural framework. I analyse a number of bodily practices that promote a Sudanese identity abroad, tying the use of beautification procedures, and skin-lightening creams in particular, to Sudanese assertions of Arab ethnicity and Muslim belonging within a racial hierarchy that derives primary meaning from Sudan¹s own history and racial categories.

All are Welcome. Booking is not required.
For further information contact: Peter Morey on p.g.morey@uel.ac.uk

Posted in: Refugee Studies / Conferences & Events.