Migrant and Minority Politics
Between 2017-2020, I conducted an extensive multi-sited ethnographic study among Jewish and Muslim interfaith actvists in the UK. Even though public media portrays Jewish and Muslim communities at odds, especially vis-à-vis the Israel-Palestine conflict, this study explores Jewish-Muslim interfaith initiatives to analyse this process of realignment as female migrants and minorities come together vis-à-vis political and social transformations in a growing Islamaphobic and antisemitic Europe.
My article Just a Cup of Tea? Jewish-Muslim Interfaith Activism and the Gendered Politics of Representation, American Behavioral Scientist (2024) focuses on the emergence of Jewish and Muslim female interfaith
initiatives, analyzing the creative ways religious women negotiate their challenges and struggles as women of faith, together. I examine the ways Jewish and Muslim women form nuanced representations of female piety that disrupt “strictly observant” gendered representations, thus diversifying the binary categories of what being Jewish, or Muslim, entails. Further, whereas former studies have focused on interfaith settings as crucial for the construction of religious identities, I show that interfaith activism also serves as a site for religious minorities to learn how to become British citizens. In a highly politicized Britain, where allegations of racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia prevail, I argue that Jewish-Muslim encounters are sites for the construction and performances of British civic citizenship well beyond the prescriptions of the state. Drawing on these findings, I situate interfaith activism at the anthropological intersection of gender, religion, and citizenship, and as a site that reproduces and disrupts minority-state relationality.
I am currently co-editing a special issue on The Materiality of Interreligious Encounters, forthcoming December 2024 with Material Religion (together with Anastasia Badder). I am also co-founder of “Migration, Religion and Medicine at State Margins - A German-Israeli Research Network”, funded by the DAAD Centre for German Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (together with Hansjörg Dilger, Claudia Liebelt, Ben Kasstan and Nurit Stadler). This interdisciplinary research network crosses disciplinary boundaries between social sciences, humanities and law as well as international domains to examine the nexus of medicine, religion and migration today. Our collaborators are based at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Technion: Israel Institute of Technology, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Freie Universität Berlin, University of Bayreuth, and the Max Planck Institute.