Summer Term Seminar Series
Open to all at LSE
Seminar 1
How Does an Israeli, Haredi, Feminist Film Look? Fill the Void and the Female Gaze
Dr Karen Skinazi, University of Bristol
Thursday 18th May 2023
4:00pm – 5:30pm
LSE PhD Academy, LRB 4.02
Karen Skinazi is Associate Professor of Literature and Culture and the Director of Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol. She is currently the President-elect for the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies (2023-4). Dr Skinazi is the author ‘Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture’ published in 2018, which received rave reviews including an Honourable Mention by the Robert K. Martin/Canadian Association for American Studies Book Prize in 2019.
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Seminar 2
Religious Citizenship: A Conceptual Discussion and Empirical Applications
Professor Line Nyhagen, Loughborough University
Thursday 1st June 2023
4:00pm – 5:30pm
LSE PhD Academy, LRB 4.02
Line Nyhagen is Professor of Sociology and Head of Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy at Loughborough University, UK, and Adjunct Professor at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen, Norway. She researches issues of gender, religion, ethnicity, and citizenship across different religions and countries, focusing on Christianity and Islam. Her monograph (with Beatrice Halsaa) Religion, Gender and Citizenship: Women of Faith, Gender Equality and Feminism (Palgrave Macmillan) was described as ‘a landmark contribution’ to knowledge about ‘religion, citizenship and women’s rights and equality in the 21st century’. Her recent work on Christian men explores competing constructions of masculinity in the context of churchgoing, worship styles and godly submission. She has also written about mosques as a gendered spaces and the issue of female imams.
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Seminar 3
Unholy Catholic Ireland: Ex-Catholicism as Anti-Nostalgic Moralised Authenticity
Dr Hugh Turpin
Wednesday 7th June 2023
4:00pm – 5:30pm
LSE PhD Academy, LRB 4.02
The Irish Republic was once considered Western Europe’s most obvious secularisation outlier. However, recent data suggest the country is now ‘losing religion’ with unusual speed. This presentation will draw on qualitative and quantitative data from my recent book Unholy Catholic Ireland to examine this change. I will focus on describing the country’s particularly ardent version of ‘nonreligion’, typified by a normative stance involving not just the moralised rejection of devout obeisance and Church-State influence, but also the prior social default of loose and noncommittal ‘cultural Catholicism’. The presentation will be followed by an open Q&A session.
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Seminar 4
The Role of Women in Haredi Social and Political Futures in Israel
Dr Heather Munro
Thursday 8th June 2023
4:00pm – 5:30pm
LSE PhD Academy, LRB 4.02
The Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) sector of Israel is gaining more and more attention globally, especially since the most recent coalition government was formed in 2022. As the fastest growing segment of Israeli society, anxiety is mounting concerning the role of the Haredim in politics and their long term effects on the democratic experiment which is Israel. The importance of understanding Haredi society, and its social and political trajectories, cannot be underestimated when considering the future of Israel, and indeed, the Middle East.
Based on over a year of ethnographic field research in Jerusalem and other locations, this paper explicates the developments which place women as central to processes of change in Haredi communities in Israel. Since the establishment of the state of Israel, Haredi society has become increasingly stringent in the interpretation of religious law and tradition. This has placed men in the hall of study, and women in the workforce. As a result, women are better educated in secular subjects and act as mediators between secular values and religious ethics. In the last decade, Haredi society has faced multiple crises around the issues created by these gender disparities in education and exposure, and as a result, has been undergoing rapid changes. Haredi society has long been perceived as a monolith which functions as a bloc in supporting specifically Haredi parties, which are centrist, with non-Zionist and socially conservative policies. The changes in the last decade have meant that the Haredi political outlook is fragmenting and pluralising, with a large proportion of Haredi voters moving towards the Right and supporting more Zionist political projects. Women, in their role in Haredi families, are often leading these breakaway undercurrents, in subtle but substantial ways.
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