Please join us for the next installment of the CSW Research Affiliate Brown Bag Series. Participants are welcome to bring a snack or lunch. Humanizing the Sacred: Sisters in Islam and the Struggle for Gender Justice in Malaysia Thursday, February 18, 12-1:30 p.m. Rolfe 2125 [51KEBOOL3FL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg] Amidst recent global turmoil involving Muslims, it is all too easy to forget that a highly significant process is steadily gaining momentum across the Islamic world and beyond: Muslim women’s involvement in the production and transmission of religious knowledge to reformulate legal codes and re-conceptualize discourses of gender. Their efforts raise a number of questions such as: Why do women activists in communities of Muslims link feminist interpretation of Islamic ideas to the discourse of rights and freedoms? How do Muslim women activists disrupt institutionalized religious authority as a way to generate new understandings of rights? How are these women “living Islam” through the integration of piety and reason? To consider these questions, join us for a conversation with Azza Basarudin, CSW Research Scholar and author of Humanizing the Sacred: Sisters in Islam and the Struggle for Gender Justice in Malaysia (University of Washington Press, 2016) and Sondra Hale, UCLA Research Professor and Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Gender Studies. Azza Basarudin Azza Basarudin is a Research Scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. Her research interests include feminist studies in Islam, transnational and postcolonial feminist theories, and feminist ethnography. She held fellowships and visiting scholar positions at Harvard University, Syracuse University, University Kebangsaan Malaysia, Universiti Sains Malaysia and the American University in Cairo. She has received awards from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Science Foundation, among others. Her essays and creative writings have appeared in journals, edited anthologies, and online/popular forums. She has collectively produced and hosted radio shows on women and gender issues in communities of Muslims. Sondra Hale Sondra Hale is co-founder and former Co-editor, The Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS); has published Gender Politics in Sudan (1996); co-edited Sudan’s Killing Fields: Fragmentation and Political Violence (2015). She is currently co-editing Networks of Knowledge Production in Sudan. She has published many articles on international gender studies, conflict, social movements, the politics of memory, and diaspora studies--Middle East and Africa. She is an activist academic who has received many awards, e.g., for Support and Commitment to the Sudanese Women’s Movement; a Scholarly Achievement Award, Association for Middle East Women’s Studies; and a Distinguished Scholarship award from the Sudan Studies Association. [Basarudin-Hales Flyer.pdf]