2018 Summer PhD seminars

The rising visibility of Islam in public unsettles the narratives of Western secular modernity. The presence of Muslim politics in Europe provides proximity in time and space, disrupts the secular chronotope, and engenders transgressions, confrontations and mutual transformations. Islam as it is practiced and interpreted by Muslims in everyday life of European cities has a transformative effect on the established boundaries of religion and secularity.  A micro-sociological approach will be adopted to study controversial Islamic practices, namely praying, mosque-building, women’s veiling, the visual representation of the sacred, and halal life styles. It will enable us to reflect upon the ways Euro-Islam permeate each other, engender a process of interpenetration, and how this plays out in new subjectivities, embodied practices, and aesthetic forms.

This seminar interrogates Islam in its implications for the making and un-making of a public culture in a post-Western Europe.  We will follow up the conceptual debates on the powers of the secular and the ways it is transformed in its confrontation with a religion other than Christianity, namely Islam.  We’ll explore a theoretical reading of EuroIslam beyond post-colonial theories and critiques of orientalism. The notion of the public sphere will be revisited in light of the intercultural and transnational dynamics that shape the social cartography of EuroIslam.

• 10-16 juin, 2018, New School for Social Research, Greenwich Village, New York, Etats-Unis.