Gastvortrag am Institut für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte der Universität Wien
Zeit: 13.12.2016, 15:00 Uhr
Ort: Universität Wien, Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien, Hörsaal 46
Die Britin Nadia Jones-Gailani hat ihren PhD von der Universität Toronto Scarborough und vertritt derzeit als Visiting Assistant Professor Suzann Zimmermann.
Via academia.edu (Link): „My first book, under review with the University of Toronto press, examines the transnational lives of Iraqi women and their migrations, memories, identities, networks, and communities within the context of global diaspora. Drawing on extensive oral histories with Iraqi women in three key sites in the diaspora – refugee camps in Amman, Jordan and immigrant communities in Detroit and Toronto – the book is also the first full-length comparative study of Iraqi refugee women in Canada and the United States. By comparing waves of female refugees before and after the 2003 U.S. invasion, it traces how women negotiate their identities and roles within kin, ethnic, and communal networks. The book also examines broader historical trends that have precipitated migration from Iraq, and shaped existing networks into which these women integrate in Western Europe, North America, and various sites in the Middle East. These three sites of migration help to more fully explain how these transnational networks of intimacy, ideas, and people operate in the lives of migrant women, and the ways in which women in these sites are intricately linked to the global diaspora of Iraqis. The book highlights my breadth as an interdisciplinary scholar who engages diverse methodologies and inspires a conversation across both spatial and theoretical borders.
‘Defensive modesty’ and shifting ideas of honour are part of the increasing politicization of Muslim female identity that I explore in my research. In the dissertation, I question how the regulation of women’s bodies in diaspora differs from the traditional patriarchal family model in Iraqi society. This involves probing the role that communication networks of family and friends in the homeland play in facilitating the regulation of female modesty in diaspora, and whether migrant (Muslim and non-Muslim) Iraqi women in North America are subject to more stringent and conservative codes of appropriate behaviour. I am particularly interested in a new trend of young Iraqi women who are choosing to veil, using the female body to project their own statement of virtue, religious identity, and political alignment through representative symbols like the hijab.
A new research project explores how homeland politics and the erosion of religious tolerance affect the negotiation of young Muslim diasporic women seeking to find their place within Western “multiculturalisms.” This research contributes to a new paradigm that bridges secular and religious feminist scholarship on Muslim women, both in the North American and Western European contexts and in the broader global conversation on political Islam(s). The phenomena I analyze include female converts to Islam wearing hijab, as well as the emergence of online communities that create a space in which to explore identities, especially in terms of love, x and marriage. This project demands that I create an interactive digital map of the effects of global trends particularly in Wahabi and Salafist practices amongst University-aged Syrian and Iraqi Muslim diasporic women in the U.S., Canada, Germany and the UK. Outreach in diasporic communities of Syrian and Iraqi Muslims allows for the tracing both the convergence and divergence of traditional and neo-conservative trends in Islamic performativity.
Supervisors: Franca Iacovetta“