Our Approach

A dominant image in the West about Islam is of a force particularly oppressive to women. Engaging feminist analysis enables us to challenge this view and to ask new questions that help us to understand Islam in the diverse ways it is interpreted, lived, and practiced. At a basic level, a focus on feminisms leads us to ask how women are participating and intervening in the realms of law, religion, family, economics, and institutions of civil society. How does the presence of women in and engagement with the day-to-day practices of these institutions affect the near and long-term structures of these domains? An analysis of Islamic feminisms enables us to understand the construction of gender and broader intertwined issues of power and inequality. Attending to feminist movements leads us to recognize the contradictions and diversity within Islam and the stresses and strains within its religious, legal, civic, and socio-cultural edifices from a perspective that has received little consideration in the dominant narratives about Islam.

UMass Boston has a long history of successful collaborative engagement among faculty in different disciplines. We draw upon the strength of our interdisciplinary ethos to respond to the intellectual and pedagogical climate of the moment, i.e. the national and international privileging of interdisciplinarity as mode of study facilitating complex understandings. Given the relative dearth of nuanced examinations of the Islamic world in higher education, we hope through the discussions of the summer institute to build an enriched knowledge-base across a network of scholars at campuses around the country; participants will then be able to implement this knowledge in ways most appropriate to their individual campuses. Faculty members at UMass Boston who have contributed to organizing the Fall Institute come from departments as diverse as Dispute Resolution, History, Literature and Film Studies, Political Science, Religious Studies, Sociology, and Women Studies.

Our Goals

We seek through this institute to reach four main goals:

  1. A four day conference that will explore in depth the relation between Islam and Feminism, the construction of gender and power, and the struggles for self-determination and expressions of cultural productions.
  2. The publication of the institute's papers as a special issue of the International Feminist Journal of Politics in Fall 2008.
  3. Interdisciplinary course on Islam to be developed following the Fall Institute and offered at UMass Boston in Fall 2008 as part of the General Education Curriculum.
  4. A post-institute high school teacher workshop to yield curricula in literatures and histories related to the Islamic world.

Free and open to the public. Please join us!

*Conference Attendees with Disabilities :  Anyone requiring disability-related accommodations in order to fully participate in this event should contact Jennifer Howard by email at jennifer.howard003@umb.edu or by phone at 508-685-5988 as soon as possible.

The 2007 Fall Institute is made possible by a grant from the Ford Foundation.