Past Events

A monthly series featuring the current research of AVACGIS faculty.

Join AVACGIS for a celebration and viewing of the After Malcolm Digital Archive with guest speakers, Sister Aisha al-Adadawiyya and lead scholar/researcher, Dr. Abbas Barzager. AFTERMALCOLM.COM.

Please join us for the launch of the After Malcolm Digital Archive. AFTERMALCOLM.COM

Dr. Yasemin Ipek will discuss how different communities in Lebanon talk about and problematize sectarianism, based on ethnographic research she conducted between 2012 and 2015. She will unpack competing local discourses on sectarianism and nationalism by examining how rival political communities and individuals blame each other for the sectarianism of the “Lebanese.” Attending to how discourses on sectarianism and nationalism are deployed in order to make competing ethical claims to citizenship, identity, belonging, and social change, Ipek will show how public debates around sectarianism could inform us on broader negotiations of social difference structured around class, urbanity, religiosity, gender, and generation. Dr. Ipek is Assistant Professor in the Global Affairs Program at George Mason University. She received her Ph.D. degree in Anthropology from Stanford University, California. She received a second doctoral degree from Bilkent University in the Department of Political Science in Turkey. Dr. Ipek teaches courses on globalization, anthropology of the Middle East, refugees and humanitarianism, youth activism, social movements and qualitative research methods. Her work has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals.

With the emergence of Muslim consumers as a new powerful segment and the shaping of a new niche market, multinational companies have begun to sell products and services that reflect the taste of Muslim consumers. South Korea is not exempt from these trends. Since March 2015, when former President Park of S. Korea signed an MOU with the UAE government for cooperation in the new emerging halal market; South Korean companies began to participate in the new Islamic markets. The more the government supported these policies within South Korea, however the stronger the anti-Islamic responses were from the public. This talk presents an analysis of deep-seated Islamophobia among the Koreans and suggest a way out of Islamophobia. Dr. Ikran Eum received a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, UK in 2004 under the supervision of Dr. Nadje Al-Ali. Eum is currently working as a researcher at the GCC institute, Dankook University in Korea, conducting a project funded by the Ministry of Education entitled “Gulf Vision 2030 and Partnership Building Strategy: Focused on Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran”. As an area specialist, she gives lectures related to Middle Eastern cultural and social studies both for students in academia and for the public, including office workers and civil servants. Her current research interests are consumerism and Islam, and family and gender issues in the Gulf countries.

Mason faculty discuss current issues on antisemitism, Islamophobia and discrimination. Open to the public and campus community. Faculty participants include: Maria Dakake (Religious Studies), Brian Platt (History), Huseyin Yilmaz (History & AVACGIS Director), Hatim El-Hibri (Film & Media, English), Noura Erakat (Integrative Studies), Amy Best (Sociology & Anthropology), Marc Gopin (CWRDC), and Lisa Breglia (Global Affairs).

Syrian refugees are often portrayed simply as either victims of a war or victims of host states' refugee policies. Dr. Ozden's research, however focuses on Syrian refugee womens' life stories in the pre and post uprising periods with the purpose of understanding the social and political contexts that led to the Syrian uprising in 2011. Therefore, instead of treating refugee life in isolation from pre-2011 contexts, she restores Syrian women's political and social agencies in the refugee narratives. Şenay Özden is a cultural anthroplogist from Turkey. Her research areas include international migration, refugees, Turkish state’s refugee policies, and politics of humanitarian aid. She has numerous articles, reports published on Syrian refugees in Turkey, and hosts a weekly radio program in Turkey about Syrian refugees. She has taught at various universities in Damascus and Istanbul. She is one of the founders of the Syrian Cultural House in Istanbul, Hamisch, which aims to bring together researchers and writers from Syria and Turkey.

Dr. Yasemin Ipek will discuss how different communities in Lebanon talk about and problematize sectarianism, based on ethnographic research she conducted between 2012 and 2015. She will unpack competing local discourses on sectarianism and nationalism by examining how rival political communities and individuals blame each other for the sectarianism of the “Lebanese.” Attending to how discourses on sectarianism and nationalism are deployed in order to make competing ethical claims to citizenship, identity, belonging, and social change, Ipek will show how public debates around sectarianism could inform us on broader negotiations of social difference structured around class, urbanity, religiosity, gender, and generation. Dr. Ipek is Assistant Professor in the Global Affairs Program at George Mason University. She received her Ph.D. degree in Anthropology from Stanford University, California. She received a second doctoral degree from Bilkent University in the Department of Political Science in Turkey. Dr. Ipek teaches courses on globalization, anthropology of the Middle East, refugees and humanitarianism, youth activism, social movements and qualitative research methods. Her work has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals.

A distinctive Chinese Islamic intellectual tradition emerged during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Chinese Muslims established an educational system, scripture hall education (jingtang jiaoyu 經堂教育), which utilized an Islamic curriculum made up of Arabic, Persian, and Chinese works. The Han Kitab, a corpus of Chinese language Islamic texts developed within this system, reinterpreted Islam through the religiophilosophical lens of Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian terminology. Several Han Kitab texts were produced by a group of self-identified “Confucian Muslim” scholars (Huiru 回儒). This presentation traces the contours of the Sino-Islamic intellectual tradition and serves as an introduction to Kristian Petersen’s book, Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). Dr. Kristian Petersen is Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University in the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies. In addition to his featured book, he is currently working on a monograph entitled, "The Cinematic Lives of Muslims". He is also host of the New Books in Religion series and New Books in Islamic Studies podcasts.