Shadowing as a Methodology

Archives de sciences sociales des religions

2018

This thesis explores the lives of young adults (18-25-year-old) who identify as Muslim in Copenhagen and Montreal. As a comparative ethnography, it sets out to examine the transatlantic similarities and differences among young people who grew up in an era where Muslims were often represented as a foreign object in need of integration, and at times as threatening. The thesis investigates processes of representation depicting young Muslims’ life histories, social positions and social identifications. Furthermore, it follows these young individuals’ movements through their cities and the spatial narratives they construct through these movements. I have sought to unravel the complexity of my interlocutors’ self-ascribed identifications of Muslim and Copenhagener/Montrealer – as well as the many other identifications they adopted - by furnishing their narratives with spatial representations; in many ways, these young people were shaped by and shaped the social spaces they inhabit. In so ...

City & Society, 2005

Drawing upon diverse elements of Islamic thought, this essay examines the notions of gathering and footwork to think through the elaborations of a material sensibility embedded in the everyday navigations of contemporary urban life. From reflections on the surreptitious encounters of African Americans in various contexts of subjection, to zar practices in Amman, and to popular orientations to megacomplex residencies in Jakarta, the essay attempts to address what it means to think and act collectively in urban contexts that fragment, track, evict, and erase long relied upon forms of collaboration. How might we discover in the seeming contraction of urban sociality something else besides intensive individuation, and what kinds of vernaculars and rhythmic encounters, of bodies moving to and away from each other, might turn the peripheral forms of the urban into sites of new generativity?

Urban Geography, 2022

Conceptualizing Othering as an intercorporeal encounter in urban space, the paper explores how Otherness is lived in the networks of everyday embodied urban living of young Muslims. We provide an in-depth understanding of the ways through which corporeal Othering is spatially organized and practised within everyday urban space felt and lived with different intensities and registered in the sensing bodies of young Muslims as part of their lived embodied urbanism in Amsterdam. We shed light on how the (re) construction of the Muslim Other is spatialized concerning intersectionality, clothing, and stereotyping.

The research report follows my attendance in two ethnographic fieldwork courses at the KU Leuven, namely ‘Ethnographic Fieldwork: Exemplary Research’ and ‘Ethnographic Fieldwork: Analysis and Communication’, with professors Patrick Devlieger and Steven Van Wolputte, respectively, at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology in 2016-17. The study was completed in three mosques in Leuven in between November 2016 and May 2017, and the report focused mostly on the ethnographic research process. For the overall exercise, I remain indebted to both professors for their invaluable guidance, and to the mosque visitors for their wonderful, enlightening, participation.

This inquiry is an endeavour to investigate my experience in engaging in autoethnography as an insider " Muslim and teacher " , and as an outsider " trained researcher " within my own community and within Islamic schools in Montreal. I am not a provisional insider who temporarily assumes or adopts his informants' identities when in the field. Indeed, I am a permanent insider who identifies with his informants' occupation, faith, culture, history, and tradition. The value of this paper lies in its attempt to enlighten community researchers about insider-outsider as well as subjective-objective dichotomies of ethnographic research, and the challenges of pre, during and post autoethnography research. This contribution aims to (1) explore the native researcher's agency in the field and the challenges he or she faces and (2) to examine the concepts insider/outsider and objectivity/ subjectivity while studying one's community.

In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion, Gender and Sexuality (Eds.) Sonya Sharma, Dawn Llewellyn, Sîan Hawthorne, 2024

The chapter highlights the theoretical relevance of the construct of performance in grasping the ambivalence intrinsic to the relationship between the cultural inscription of difference and embodied subjectivity. Performance is a concept that focuses on the body and non-cognitive experiences in producing social life. The latter has constituted our field of investigation in the four years of field research. The general aim was to analyse the process of becoming an Italian Muslim woman through the lens of everyday embodied practices. Inspired by Göle's work (2005), we investigated culturally interpenetrated contexts where the encounter with the other is a process of contact/clash, embodied, visceral, violent and subjectively oriented. The performance's analytical construct helps to capture the multiplicity of ways in which Italian Muslim women produce new spatialities and are produced by them. By mixing up classifications and representations, performance allows us to grasp the event as an unfinished and dynamic process, a tension to escape reproduction.