A Master Class and Workshop with CAIS HDR Students and ECRs on “Researching Social and Political Movements in the Middle East and Central Asia"
Workshop
This interactive workshop will explore theoretical and methodological approaches to studying Islamic social and political movements in the Middle East and Central Asia. How and under what structural, political, and cultural conditions does Islamism emerge as an oppositional identity? What…
CAIS Public Lecture Series | Islam in a Globalised World: Local, National, and International Dimensions
Lecture/seminar
What is the role of Islam as a lived, embodied faith in shaping individual subjectivities, collective identities, and political practices across different spatial scales? This lecture will critically examine the vernacularization of Islam—how global Islamic discourses are translated, localized, and…
CAIS Public Lecture Series | States and Social Hierarchies in Kuwait and the Arab Gulf Region
Lecture/seminar
How do autocratic regimes instrumentalize ascriptive identity to maintain political power? I argue that by enforcing status boundaries for privileged groups, status rewards act as a club good for those in a regime's coalition. To demonstrate the empirical implications of these ideas, I…
Sport as Nation Storydoing: Citizenship Making for the 21st Century
Lecture/seminar
The United Arab Emirates over a decade ago adopted Brazilian Jiu-jitsu as its officially recognised national sport. Scholars and commentators have described it as eccentric and unexpected move within the regional context of unprecedented investments in mega sporting events and mainstream sports…
CAIS Public Lecture Series | Crescent Moon, Hammer, and Sickle: Muslim Socialists, Marxist Muslims, and Islamic Populists in Modern Iran
Lecture/seminar
This presentation explores the fraught and generative encounters between Islam and socialism in modern Iran, from the early days of the Cold War through the post-1979 revolutionary order. It identifies three analytically distinct yet historically overlapping political-theological orientations –…
An Ethnographic Study of Shenzhen Muslims
Lecture/seminar
Shenzhen’s Muslim community—now estimated at over 150 000—has flourished in lockstep with a city that has morphed, in barely four decades, from a coastal fishing village to a tech-driven metropolis. In the late 1980s, the first known Muslim residents were few enough to be counted on one hand; today…
Book Discussion: "International Political Economy and the Global South" (2025)
Book launch
Dr Zaynab El Bernoussi will discuss her new co-authored book with Dr Jessie Moritz on International Political Economy and the Global South: Perspectives from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East (2025). The primary goal of this new book is to provide an alternative or…