Sponsored by The New School for Social Research (newschool.edu/nssr).
The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry will open part of its programming to the public - a series of lectures taught by this Summer's faculty cohort of Richard J. Bernstein (NSSR), Nilüfer Göle (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), and Jean and John Comaroff (Harvard University).
The New School | newschool.edu
EUROISLAM: SECULAR PUBLIC CULTURE IN QUESTION
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.
Nilüfer Göle is a Professor of Sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. She works on Islamic visibility, secularism and intercultural controversies in European public spheres. Her sociological approach aims to open up a new reading of modernity from a non-western perspective and a broader critique of Eurocentrism in the definitions of secular modernity.
About the Institute:
The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI) is designed to provide advanced graduate students and junior faculty from around the world with the opportunity to spend one week at the New School’s campus in Greenwich Village working closely with some of the most distinguished thinkers shaping the course of contemporary social inquiry. Each of these scholars will teach a week-long seminar on a foundational thinker or topic of contemporary concern in a series of hands-on, intensive, and intimate sessions.
Location:
Johnson/Kaplan Auditorium
63 5th Ave, New York, NY
Tuesday, June 12, 2018 at 5:30 pm