Dr Banu Senay will present a Keynote speech at the upcoming CAIS Conference -  'Three Languages, Three Cultures: Narratives from the Middle East'. The conference will be held at CAIS on 22 & 23 November 2018.

Dr Senay is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research areas include phenomenological anthropology, music and cultural politics, Islam and subjectivity, and transnationalism. Her current research on Islamic art pedagogies in Istanbul explores the effects of skill acquisition, engaging with important debates in anthropology around learning, self-formation and ethics, specifically in relation to Sufi Islam and to one of its most significant dimensions, music. She is the author of Beyond Turkey’s Borders: Long-distance Kemalism, State Politics and the Turkish Diaspora (I.B. Tauris, 2013) and Crafting Ethical Selves: Islam and Music in Istanbul (forthcoming).

'Musical Islam: Explorations in Sufi Music'
Too often, conventional social science investigation of Muslim governments and movements privilege political and legal fields as their focus of study. By contrast, this talk examines relations between State-driven projects of modernity and citizens’ everyday practices through the lens of arts and aesthetics. Based on extensive fieldwork in Istanbul, and taking the chequered social life of Sufi music there as its case study, the talk explores complex interactions between Islam, nationalism, and cultural politics in modern Turkey.   

Read more and check out the conference program