​​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.

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​​​I co-edited a special issue on The Materiality of Interreligious Encounters with Material Religion (together with Anastasia Badder). The issue provides a diverse sample of scholarly attention to the role of the material in interreligious relations. It features articles by five anthropologists (Hanane Benadi, Yulia Egorova, Samuel Everett, Lindsay Simmonds, and Erica Weiss) whose research considers spaces of religious intersection, proximity, and negotiation and the potential of material things therein. Prompted by Birgit Meyer’s opening reflection, with responses from Ayala Fader, Vlad Naumescu, and Jeremy Walton, this issue’s In Conversation section further explores how closer focus on senses, aesthetics, space, time, and music can enhance our understanding of interreligious encounters as well as offer fresh insights at the nexus of religion and materiality. Together, these wide-ranging articles offer three main contributions: they demonstrate the material pragmatics of living together; they illuminate interreligious proximities that tend to be lost in discursive processes of religious differentiation; and they subvert normative views of interreligious encounter as primarily a matter of clashing beliefs, texts, and theologies.

 

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.