Sertaç Sehlikoglu
Dr. Sertaç Sehlikoglu is an Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow at the University College London’s Institute for Global Prosperity. Sehlikoglu’s work often focuses on intangible aspects of human subjectivity that enable humans to change and transform social life. She has published ethnography-based research on intangible aspects, such as intimacy, desire, agency, and political imaginaries and conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey, Lebanon, Bosnia-Herzegovina, North Macedonia, and Kosovo. Sehlikoglu is the recipient of a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant (2019) for her project, “Imaginative Landscapes of Islamist Politics Across the Balkan-to-Bengal Complex” (TAKHAYYUL). Her first single-authored monograph Working Our Desire: Women, Sport and Self-Making in Istanbul (Syracuse UP, 2021) combines detailed ethnographic research with an intricate analysis of gendered desires and subjectivities in contemporary Turkey. Its implications extend beyond the immediate context, offering insights for studying gender, agency, and the impact of neoliberal consumer society in the modern Middle East.
As an accomplished editor, she co-edited several special issues on themes related to intimacy, critique, and ethical imagination in journals, including the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology (2015), the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2016), Society for Cultural Anthropology (2014), Contemporary Islam (2024), and History and Anthropology (forthcoming), and International Journal of Heritage Studies (forthcoming); and a volume titled The Everyday Makings of Heteronormativity: Cross-Cultural Explorations of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality (Lexington, 2020).
Sehlikoglu is also the editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies’ Reviews Section and the Associate Editor of Contemporary Islam.
As an accomplished editor, she co-edited several special issues on themes related to intimacy, critique, and ethical imagination in journals, including the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology (2015), the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2016), Society for Cultural Anthropology (2014), Contemporary Islam (2024), and History and Anthropology (forthcoming), and International Journal of Heritage Studies (forthcoming); and a volume titled The Everyday Makings of Heteronormativity: Cross-Cultural Explorations of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality (Lexington, 2020).
Sehlikoglu is also the editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies’ Reviews Section and the Associate Editor of Contemporary Islam.
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different Olympic sporting events. In this paper, we critique online and print news articles, op-ed
pieces and radio and television reports produced about these women athletes. We focus specifically
on mediated representations that were constructed before and during the Games, and which
originated and circulated across what is commonly referred to as “the West” (referring here to
North America, Canada, Australia and parts of Western Europe). The aim is to ascertain what was
considered newsworthy in relation to “Muslim sportswomen,” and what this reveals about popular
mediated understanding of Muslim sports/women. Ahmed’s (2000) discussion of ‘strange
encounters’ is used as an analytical framework to make sense of the ways in which Muslim
sportswomen, their sporting bodies and their presence at the Olympic Games was, typically,
discussed, defined and represented to Western audiences through a manifold process of constant
‘Othering’. Emphasis is placed on exposing the underlying intentions of the authors/writers and
contextualizing the relations of power, bias and subjectivity through which female Muslim athletes
competing at London 2012 were mis/represented as strange, incompetent and out-of-place.
By demonstrating the extent to which orientalist thinking continues to infiltrate contemporary
western discussions on Islam and Muslim women, findings in this paper strengthen not only what
Ahmed calls an ‘ontology of strangeness’ but also add to and lend further support to the work of
post-colonial feminists, feminist media studies scholars and sociologists of sport.
different Olympic sporting events. In this paper, we critique online and print news articles, op-ed
pieces and radio and television reports produced about these women athletes. We focus specifically
on mediated representations that were constructed before and during the Games, and which
originated and circulated across what is commonly referred to as “the West” (referring here to
North America, Canada, Australia and parts of Western Europe). The aim is to ascertain what was
considered newsworthy in relation to “Muslim sportswomen,” and what this reveals about popular
mediated understanding of Muslim sports/women. Ahmed’s (2000) discussion of ‘strange
encounters’ is used as an analytical framework to make sense of the ways in which Muslim
sportswomen, their sporting bodies and their presence at the Olympic Games was, typically,
discussed, defined and represented to Western audiences through a manifold process of constant
‘Othering’. Emphasis is placed on exposing the underlying intentions of the authors/writers and
contextualizing the relations of power, bias and subjectivity through which female Muslim athletes
competing at London 2012 were mis/represented as strange, incompetent and out-of-place.
By demonstrating the extent to which orientalist thinking continues to infiltrate contemporary
western discussions on Islam and Muslim women, findings in this paper strengthen not only what
Ahmed calls an ‘ontology of strangeness’ but also add to and lend further support to the work of
post-colonial feminists, feminist media studies scholars and sociologists of sport.
In the first conference of our ERC project entitled “TAKHAYYUL: Imaginative Landscapes of Islamist Politics Across Balkan-to-Bengal Complex” we bring together academic works that seek to offer a fresh perspective that does not reproduce the irrational tropes yet is able to move beyond the Eurocentric preoccupation with liberalism and secularism. While a growing consensus emerges on the multiplicity of paths to modernity, the relationship of modernity with disenchantment and secularization is being hotly debated. In the West, scholars note that disenchantment caused by the retreat of religion in public life is replaced by the rise of ‘secular magic’- through charisma, myth, and revelation. This conference seeks to contribute to the scholarship on contemporary forms of populist politics through a focus on the mystical, charismatic, dreams, and the affective. We aim to develop a discussion around various theoretical approaches on which to delineate the ways Islamist movements forge imaginative landscapes.
In this conference, we ask: How can we expand our understanding of the formation of various populist Islamist political milieus through a focus on longing, nostalgia, dreams, desire, and other subjective, psychoanalytical, emotional, and aesthetic facets of everyday life? How do imaginative and emotive references shape and steer the ideals of prosperity? If any, what are the obstacles to those ideals in the formations of narratives around hope and a better future?
The conference brings together a wide array of scholars working on Muslim societies and Islamist movements across the world. It will stimulate a debate on the parallels and differences between various Islamist movements and their claims on the past, present, and future in an interdisciplinary forum bringing together scholars of sociology, political science, anthropology, social and legal history, and cultural studies.
Please express your interest in the conference by filling out this form before the 9th of July, 2022.
The selected papers will be part of the open-access edited volume.
This conference is part of the ERC StG 2019 TAKHAYYUL Project (853230)
The conference will be merged with the launch of our project on the evening of 2nd December.
CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
Day I: December 2, Friday
10:00 Welcome Speech
1) [ Time ] Populism and Prosperity 1: Populist Imaginaries
This panel invites papers which advance the discussion of populism beyond the confines of structuralist explanations through a focus on subjective, psychoanalytical, emotional, and aesthetic factors. It seeks to expand these discussions toward Muslim countries and posits the question: Is the contemporary rise of Islamic populism among Muslim majority countries a move towards post-Islamism?
We invite scholars who are interested in contributing to one or more of the following questions: How and when do cognition and affect produce populist discourses? How do individual and collective aspirations and anxieties construct a normative distinction of us versus them? How do populist normative injunctions affect political preferences? Can we trace these aspirations and anxieties to postcolonial pasts?
2) [ Time ] Populism and Prosperity 2: Engendering Populisms and the Masculinist Restorations
This panel invites papers that would address the epistemological issues of canonical scholarship that tends to sideline gender analysis. It takes a strong critical position, especially in the writings of the Middle East and South Asia, where gender segregation is inevitably administering the dominant social and political discourses. It also directly questions the work conducted by male scholars with male-only interlocutors that simultaneously fail to address the masculinity aspect. We invite panellists who address one or multiple of the following questions:
How do the gendered aspects of social formations inform everyday politics and the political discourses in the region? More specifically, can we trace elements of masculinity, or even hyper-masculinity, in the political resurgence of Islamist movements? How do intimacies in gendered spaces become a way of constructing normative notions of masculinity and femininity? How do gender normativities become a means of populist mobilizations?
The central concern of this seminar series is to look at contemporary Middle and Near East through unaccustomed angles, as an attempt to unfix the Eurocentric categories, and narrow the epistemological gap by informing ourselves about seemingly less political aspects of the everyday life in the region.
By starting a conversation about the region, this seminar series aim to use desire as a central theme. Desire enables a gripping discussion at multiple levels: gendered, political, social, and religious.
June 10-11, 2017 - University of Cambridge