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.

TODAY: REFUGEE RESEARCH CENTRE SEMINARS, SEMESTER B, 2007-08

REFUGEE RESEARCH CENTRE SEMINARS, SEMESTER B, 2007-08

IN COOPERATION WITH

CENTRE ON HUMAN RIGHTS IN CONFLICT

May 7, 2008, 4:30 – 6 pm, Room EB.G05, East Building, UEL Docklands Campus

Dr Nadje Al-Ali

Director, Centre for Gender Studies, SOAS, University of London, will give a talk entitled:

‘What kind of Liberation? Diaspora Mobilization, Women's Rights and Violence in Post-Invasion Iraq’

Nadje Al-Ali is Director in Gender Studies, Centre for Gender Studies, SOAS. Her main research interests revolve around gender theory; feminist activism; women and gender in the Middle East; transnational migration and diaspora moblization; war, conflict and reconstruction. Her publications include Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (2007, Zed Books); New Approaches to Migration (ed. Routledge, 2002); Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2000) and Gender Writing – Writing Gender (The American University in Cairo Press, 1994) and as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles. Her forthcoming book (co-authored with Nicola Pratt) is entitled What kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation in Iraq (University of California Press). She is also a founding member of Act Together: Women’s Action for Iraq. (www.acttogether.org ) and a member of Women in Black UK.

ALL WELCOME!

Posted in: News.

New Online Resource

Diaspora.fi is a resource page for scholars interested in religions in the globalising world. It provides information on available studies, journals, projects and researchers in the field. The diaspora mailing list is an information channel for new publications, funding, positions, conferences and other events. Areas of interest include religion in diaspora, religion and international migration, globalisation and transnationalism, and the study of religion in local settings. Hence, an interest for religious mapping projects is central, as they reval the many forms that traditions take once situated in a new context.

There is also an interest toward the settlement processes of religious groups, religion and integration, racism and ethnicity. Beyond settelement, there are questions of migrant generations, mixed marriages, gender, religiosity, etc. The aim of the website is to promote the study of these and related issues, and to create debate and connections between researchers. I hope you shall enjoy this resource. All suggestions for additions and collaboration are welcome.

Web address: http://www.diaspora.fi/index.html