School of Social and Political Science

Description

In keeping with the International Women's Day theme of #AccelerateAction for gender equality and the UN Women's theme of For ALL women and girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment, IASH and GENDER.ED present this discussion event exploring progress towards equal rights for Muslim women and girls.

Dr Qazi Sarah Rasheed (PhD, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur) will present on Muslim women and gender equality, specifically in the Indian context, and Dr Hamide Elif Üzümcü (PhD, University of Padua) will discuss girlhood and Islam, in the context of children’s intrafamilial privacy, including their strategies for navigating digital, emotional, physical, and intellectual privacy. Both speakers are postdoctoral fellows at the University of Edinburgh's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, known as IASH. The event is chaired by Professor Patricia Jeffery (University of Edinburgh), and will be followed by tea and cake.

Dr Qazi Sarah Rasheed holds a PhD in Sociology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. Her project while at IASH is titled Exploring Hidden Narratives: Agency and Activism among Shia Muslim Women through the Lens of Majlis. Her research provides a nuanced perspective on the experiences of Muslim women in India. It challenges simplistic narratives that portray them solely as passive victims of discriminatory religious family laws. Instead, it highlights how factors such as poverty, traditional customs, societal pressures, and legal complexities collectively restrict their agency in marriage, divorce, and other aspects of life. Her academic interests revolve around the intersection of gender, religion, and law. She aims to integrate academic insights with practical advocacy to address gender inequality and emphasize the agency and resilience of Muslim women navigating structural and socio-cultural challenges in India.

Dr Hamide Elif Üzümcü is a social scientist whose work is broadly located in childhood and family studies, particularly in intra- and intergenerational family relationships and narrative methodologies. Before joining the IASH research community to work on her project Storytelling and Imaginal in Sufism: Narratives of Islamic Environmental Ethics from Children and Parents in Sufi Families, she collaborated as a postdoctoral research fellow in a multinational project at the University of Padua in Italy, where she was awarded a PhD cum Laude in 2021. Her doctoral research on children’s intrafamilial privacy, conducted through long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Türkiye, earned her the Turkish Social Sciences Association’s Young Social Scientist Prize in 2023. Outputs from her research have been published in the journals Children & Society and Families, Relationships and Societies. Dr Üzümcü is also author of sociological fiction ‘Chronicles of Constrained Negotiations.’

Professor Patricia Jeffery is Emerita Professor of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. Since 1970, her fieldwork in various parts of South Asia has focused on gender politics, especially reproductive health and education, and their links to demographic change. Her publications include Frogs in a Well: Indian Women in Purdah (1979), Don’t Marry me to a Plowman! Women’s Everyday Lives in Rural North India (1996 [2019]), and Confronting Saffron Demography: Religion, fertility and women’s status in India (2006). Two further books based on her long-term research in a Muslim village in western Uttar Pradesh are in the pipeline, one on the ‘demographic transition’, child survival and fertility decline, the other on the ‘intergenerational contract’ in the context of demographic change, ‘jobless’ growth, consumerism and communal politics.

This event is presented by the University of Edinburgh's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH); GENDER.ED, the cross-University hub for gender and sexualities studies from an interdisciplinary perspective; and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World.

This is a free event, which means we overbook to allow for no-shows and to avoid empty seats. While we generally do not have to turn people away, this does mean we cannot guarantee everyone a place. Admission is on a first come, first served basis.

Registration

**This event has now sold out!**

Accessibility

This event will take place at IASH, 2 Hope Park Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9NW. Please see a map here: https://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/location

The Seminar Room is on the first floor, and unfortunately IASH does not have a lift. If you have mobility issues and would like to discuss access, please contact iash@ed.ac.uk as soon as possible.