Round 2 Award Recipients

Our project examines how contemporary socio-religious change emerging from the confrontation of local and global Islam has impacted processes of individual and collective meaning-making in Senegal and northwest Africa. We will foster the institutionalization of research cooperation between our two universities by bringing Columbia University researcher to Senegal to conduct a training course in life history, ethnographic, and historical methods for Senegalese graduate students. We will hold a conference in Senegal to bring relevant scholars of northwest Africa and Columbia University together to develop a new research agenda. We will also bring Gaston Berger University faculty to New York to conduct a three-day workshop on the method of mémographie and the place of Islam in Senegalese public life.

Vietnam’s history of the war between rival capitals in Hanoi and Saigon has meant that overseas communities in the United States, Australia, and Canada are overwhelmingly made up of refugees from southern Vietnam, while overseas communities in Europe (Prague, Berlin, Warsaw and Moscow) are made up of students and contract workers who came from northern Vietnam. Building on previous research in California’s “Little Saigons”, this project looks at the ritual life of the “Little Hanois”, where a resurgence of popular religious practices has accompanied postsocialist development. We propose to document how regional differences have traveled to new destinations and interacted with the cosmopolitan challenges of practicing Vietnamese religion in secular European countries. Generational differences, ritual uses of the flags of Saigon and Hanoi, and the worship of nature-based mother goddesses will all be explored in these new settings, to prepare a co-authored comparative analysis.

The project is a qualitative study of how religion shapes the formation and success of grassroots leaders in the field of social welfare, that is, Ugandan social entrepreneurs. Employing a combination of in-depth interviews, focus groups, and community survey techniques, we seek to understand the role of religious beliefs, practices, and institutional structures in the formation of such leaders and their organizations; how interreligious dynamics influence their efforts; and how religion matters for the development of trusting relationships between these leaders and the communities they seek to help. We focus on such leaders and their relationships to their constituents as a way of understanding the larger overlapping religious, political, and social welfare fields in Uganda, and ultimately to show how religion contributes to social transformation by motivating and enabling certain forms of local transformative action.

The project explores the relationship between Christian institutions and citizenship among youth in urban Africa. Defined as people 15-29 years old, African youth comprise 40 percent of the continent’s population and often face a precarious socioeconomic situation. Through an innovative, four-stage research design that uses quantitative analysis, as well as interviews, focus groups, and process tracing of oral histories conducted in Ghana, Tanzania, and Uganda, this project will investigate the following questions: (1) How do Christian institutions shape citizenship norms and behaviors among African youth? (2) How do Christian institutions prioritize particular citizenship norms and behaviors, depending on the gender and economic standing of youth? (3) How do these Christian efforts influence how youth themselves understand citizenship and act on that citizenship?

Responding to the post-9/11 growth of global Muslim extremist networks, the Moroccan monarchy has developed a holistic counter-terrorism approach by coupling domestic surveillance and international intelligence sharing with Islamic doctrinal and educational reform grounded in local traditions of Sufism, Islam’s inner or mystical spiritual tradition. Our project focuses on the Morocco’s reform efforts by surveying, interviewing, and observing current students and past graduates of its most celebrated training programs, which authorize Muslim imams and spiritual guides to assume positions of leadership in Morocco, Europe, and West Africa. Through our research we seek to understand and describe this globally influential, non-fundamentalist form of Islamic governance and grasp its implications for democratic growth and peace in and beyond the Muslim world. themselves understand citizenship and act on that citizenship?

The self-styled Islamic State’s (IS) violence against the Yazidis, a religious minority, in the Sinjar area of northern Iraq, in the summer of 2014 resulted in mass executions, enslavements, and displacements. This project develops a cross-continental collaboration among three scholars from the United States, Iraqi Kurdistan, and United Kingdom to offer a comprehensive study of the Yazidi community at three interrelated dimensions: (a) the transformation and resiliency of Yazidi beliefs and norms in the wake of the genocidal violence, (b) the evolution of gender relations among the Yazidis in the wake of sexual enslavement of Yazidi women, and (c) the nature of relations between Yazidis and Sunni Arabs and Kurds. It will integrate the study of Yazidis into the mainstream social science literature on religion, political violence, post-conflict reconciliation, and gender relations. It entails a bottom-up perspective entailing extensive fieldwork that will document the diversity of the Yazidi experience beyond simplistic narratives.

Whitaker and Rajasingham-Senanayake will conduct collaborative, ethnographic fieldwork at multi-religious sites and spaces of religious innovation, including gendered innovation, in rural and urban settings in Sri Lanka, in the context of an otherwise, communally segregated public culture and popular media. Our research seeks to ascertain if and how sites and practices of multi-religious innovation may have a mitigating effect on this Indian Ocean island nation’s present and future inter-religious and intra-religious tensions. Since Sri Lanka’s 26 year war (1983-2009) ended eight years ago, there has been “a turn to religion” by all the Island’s major religious groups -- Buddhist, Christian, Hindu and Muslim -- evident in the building and restoration of religious shrines, and in religious innovations at the margins of accepted religiosity.