NIAS podcast: Room to explore

with Ahmed El Shamsy & Pieter Coppens

The academic study of Islam classifies the vast majority of Muslims today as Sunnis. But many of these Muslims do not necessarily identify themselves as such, nor is the classification based on a robust definition of what a Sunni is, or even what kind of a phenomenon Sunnism represents. Is it a theology? An attitude toward politics and religion? An affiliation with one of the four “Sunni” schools of Islamic law? Or simply a residual category for Muslims who do not fit any other, better-defined category? Does Sunnism constitute a sect or a denomination? Do such terms even make sense when applied to a religious landscape that has no centralised authority comparable to a church?

The goal of Ahmed El Shamsy’s project at NIAS is not to define the boundaries of “true” Sunnism but rather to reconstruct what Sunnism meant in particular times and places, especially to those who used the label to describe themselves. Focusing on the hitherto sidelined early history of Sunnism is crucial for understanding Sunnism as a whole, because it renders intelligible the continuing debates and tensions among later Sunnis as they grappled with the task of harmonizing their discordant heritage.

Ahmed El Shamsy is Professor of Islamic Thought at the University of Chicago. He studies how Sunnism emerged as a coherent confessional identity, and how it both reflected and shaped its adherents’ views of history, politics, and theology.

Pieter Coppens is Associate Professor of Islamic Intellectual and Cultural History at the Free University in Amsterdam. He studies paradigm shifts within Islamic thought and culture, through longue durée investigation of specific themes such as Sufism, Salafism, eschatology, sensory history, history of emotions, and the history of dying.

We are preparing the transcript to provide a text alternative. It will be available soon.

NIAS Fellow Aleksandar Bošković studies experimental art from the former Yugoslavia, focusing on how these creative practices – across literature, film, visual arts, and radio – express decolonial aesthetics and its radical epistemologies.

At the core of these practices is a compelling idea: that “nothing” can help us rethink how value is created. His research demonstrates how, using techniques of refusal and negation, Yugoslav artists reframe the question of value and offer new ways of imagining future cultural narratives.

Radical Yugoslav art practices, Bošković argues, remind us that the same principle applies to both post-Balkan and European contexts: such a culture is founded not on identity but on responsibility.

For a text alternative, read the transcript of the NIAS podcast Room to explore. Episode 4: Nothing

While colleges and universities no longer formally prohibit women and people of color from joining the faculty, recent research shows that those groups continue to face institutional barriers. Slow progress on integrating the professoriate, moreover, is undermining confidence in the university as a meritocratic institution. Meanwhile, the paucity of diverse role models in the professoriate discourages women and people of color from pursuing careers in academia and undermines the academic confidence of students from those groups.

NIAS Fellow Frank Dobbin is Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. He and his team have studied annual federal data on the composition of faculty at U.S. universities and on individual career histories of over 10,000 faculty. They have furthermore surveyed 670 universities on the history of their hiring, promotion, diversity, and work-life programs and policies. With this data in hand, they are analyzing the effects of dozens of different policies on the professoriate.

Their analyses suggest that many of the most popular programs, such as diversity and harassment training and grievance processes, have null or negative effects, leading to decreases in faculty diversity.  But other simple measures, such as targeted hiring, formal mentoring, diversity task forces, and work-life initiatives show robust positive effects on faculty diversity.

For a text alternative, read the transcript of the NIAS podcast Room to explore. Episode 3: Why many diversity programs backfire

Security claims and thinking are dominant in most all aspects of modern culture, economy and our social and private lives – from airport security, to anti-war protests on campuses, to neighbourhood vigilantes. Not only is the security industry one of the world’s largest employers, the frame of security also contaminates and shapes sectors, experiences, policies and authorities we don’t readily associate with it.

Writer Ed Schwarzschild, anthropologists Tessa Diphoorn and Erella Grassiani, and sociologist Winifred Poster formed the NIAS Theme Group Re-imagining Security Labour to delve into a wide range of aspects of security work, politics and policies. In putting the lived experiences of security workers front and center, they paint a vivid portrait of the global security enterprise and the way it shapes countless lives.

For a text alternative, read the article ‘Bullsh*t Security?’.

How can we address the very real rise of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Europe against the backdrop of the Israel-Hamas war? How can we avoid entrenched positions that frame the Israel-Hamas war as a war between Jews and Palestinians?

NIAS-fellows Aysenur Korkmaz and Jessica Feldman discuss the dangers of discursively conflating Jews with the state of Israel and Palestinians (and pro-Palestinian voices) with Hamas and consider how to more productively define, recognize, and protect against anti-Semitism (acts or speech against “Jews as Jews”) and Islamophobia in the current climate. This podcast was recorded at the NIAS library on the 22 January 2024.

For a text alternative, read the article ‘The Danger of Conflation in Light of the Israel–Hamas War’.

Room to explore is researched and interviewed by Annick van Rinsum. Find Annick on LinkedIn.