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Mayanthi Fernando

Mayanthi Fernando is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she also directs the Center for Cultural Studies. She is the author of The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Duke, 2014) and has published articles in a wide array of journals, including Public CultureMethod & Theory in the Study of ReligionAmerican EthnologistSigns: Journal of Women & Culture; and HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. She has held residential fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, and is on the editorial board of The Immanent Frame.

Essays

Temporality, Asphyxiation, Debilitation

I am struck by the resonance of this notion of asphyxiation, of debilitation as asphyxiation, which makes sense not just to think about debilitated populations in the United States and Palestine/Israel, but also other populations too, in spaces ruled, albeit in different ways, by the logics of neo-liberal capitalism and biopolitical security.

Pussy Riot and the Church

This piece is from the Political Theology Network archives originally posted on August 23, 2012.

In Memoriam:                                                                      Metropolitan John D. Zizioulas and the Journey of Theology Toward the Future

The prominent Eastern Orthodox theologian Metropolitan John D. Zizioulas of Pergamon (Ecumenical Patriarchate) passed in Athens, on February 2, 2023.

Vulnerability

From Myanmar to Mariupol, from the streets of Memphis to the waves and winds of the Mediterranean Sea: resistance to violence takes many forms. So does political protest against precarity. At which point does the unavoidable vulnerability of the living condition come to expression as political agency? Can such precarious politics constitute or configure an alternative community?

Saba Mahmood

Saba Mahmood (1962-2018) was a pioneering anthropologist of Islam and secularism, a feminist theorist of gender and religion, and a critic of liberal certainties.