Alter-Native Mobilities and Boundaries Seminar (original) (raw)

Towards a Multi-Religious Topology of Islam: The Global Circulation of a Mutable Mobile

Entangled Religions, 2019

Narratives of the origins, the history, and the present state of Islam always entail spatial claims. Accordingly, Islam emerged in the Arabian Peninsula, spread over its so-called heartlands, and became a world religion. A common understanding inscribes Islam onto the Orient and opposes it to Europe, the Occident, or the West. Such spatial claims are faced with fundamental challenges and epistemological shortcomings because neither Islam nor space are naturally given, bounded entities. Rather, different historical actors and observers produce spatialized Islam. In this chapter, I challenge the notion that “Muslim space” is a useful analytical concept, and scrutinize the ways in which academic discourses inscribe Islam onto space and history. As an alternative, I propose a topology that understands the production of space as a multi-dimensional social process, including Muslim and non-Muslim perspectives at the same time. Thus, I delineate the topology of Islam as variegated, dynamic...

Migration and Transnationalism in the Muslim World

This upper-level seminar is an introduction in three respects: first, it provides an overview of the various experiences of mobility (and immobility) studied by ethnographers of migration and the issues or questions that emerge from these studies. Second, the course explores multiple geographies and imagined communities categorized as "Muslim" to understand how movement continually shapes not only these geographies and communities but also those labeled "non-Muslim." Finally, this course represents a diverse range of methodological approaches, quandaries, and concerns that "doing migration ethnography" engenders, especially grappling with questions of anthropology and geography's entanglements with colonialism and white supremacy. Through these studies, we'll explore how identities are formed and reformed, how citizenship is performed or denied, how spaces are made and struggled over, how people get stuck or cut loose, and how home is lost and remade. Fundamental to these explorations are questions of identity and belonging expressed through registers of race, religion and gender.