Tuesday 17 May 2016

“Enough with excuses!”: The Brussels and Paris attacks and the dilemmas of public anthropology with Nadia Fadil

Join us for a conversation with Professor Nadia Fadil at 5:30pm in the Audit Room at King's. All welcome. 

The attacks in Paris and Brussels in 2015 and 2016 have sparked a new set of debates on Islam, radicalisation and the increasing participation of European born Muslims in new forms of violence. It is against that background that many scholars working on Islam in Europe are regularly asked to intervene in the public debate to share their analysis and views on these questions. In my paper I will offer a meta-reflection on the kind of public discourses anthropologists and other social scientists bring to the fore in these kinds of contexts, and how these sit in tension with those articulated by our own informants. This paper seeks to critically address the kinds of challenges that are implied in these kinds of discussions, my own hesitations and dilemmas in taking my own informants' accounts “seriously” and how these difficulties are also revelatory of the secular and liberal sensibilities that predominantly inform public speech and of which our own public discourse, as scholars, is a testimony.

Nadia Fadil works as an Assistant Professor at the Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Center in the department of Anthropology at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven). A first thread in her research looks at processes of subject formation, and how pious and secular Muslims (of Maghrebi origin) construct themselves into ethical selves. A second thread in her work pays attention to modes of regulation and governance of religion and multiculturalism in Europe. Her publications have appeared in international peer-reviewed journals (such as Hau, Identities, Feminist Review, Social Anthropology, Ethnicities) and she is the author of several chapters in edited volumes published with international presses. She is also the editor of a book in Dutch on multiculturalism in Flanders (Een Leeuw in een Kooi. De Grenzen van het Multicultureel Vlaanderen, 2008) and is the Principal Investigator of a Research Project that looks at new forms of mobility of European Muslims to the UAE and Canada (2015-2019).

-----------
As part of:

KING’S IN THE MIDDLE EAST:
Conversations in history and society

Easter Term 2016

All talks at 5:30pm in King's College

Thursday, May 5
The afterlife of revolution in southern Oman
Alice Wilson (Durham)
in Wine Room

Wednesday, May 11
Jihad -- What is it Good For? (Analytically Speaking)
Darryl Li (Yale)
in Audit Room

Tuesday, May 17
“Enough with excuses!”: The Brussels and Paris attacks and the dilemmas of public anthropology
Nadia Fadil (KU Leuven)
in Audit Room

Wednesday, May 18
Iraq's disappearing religions, and why they matter
Gerard Russell, author of Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms
In Audit Room

ALL WELCOME

Generously supported by the King’s College Research Committee
Convenor: Mezna Qato [mq212@cam.ac.uk]

No comments:

Post a Comment