Lecture | LIAS After-Lunch Talk Series
Humanities and Engaged Scholarship
- Date
- Wednesday 16 April 2025
- Time
- Series
- LIAS After-Lunch Talk Series
- Location
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 1.30 (KITLV Seminar Room)
Abstract
Debates on decolonization, racism, inequality, gender, and injustice increasingly bring humanities scholars to critically engage in questions about sources of knowledge, ways of knowing, power relations, and disciplinary norms and practices. In this talk, I will address these questions by looking at the multiple ways in which academic freedom and social engagement are intertwined in the humanities, and in the study of religion in particular. I will build upon three episodes from the 450-year history of Leiden University. I will show what light these episodes throw on our understanding of academic freedom and social engagement and what consequences they have had for our field, the study of religion. In conclusion, I will explore avenues for engaged scholarship by reviewing epistemologies, the relationship with theology, the inclusion of the people and places we study in decision-making processes, and university missions and policies.
About the speaker
Nathal M. Dessing is University Lecturer in the Anthropology of Religion at the Leiden University Centre for the Study of Religion, and director of the Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam in Society. At Leiden since 1985, she has witnessed the shift from Faculty of Theology to Leiden Institute for Religious Studies (LIRS) and to Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS), as well as the rise and fall of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM). She is the author of Rituals of Birth, Circumcision, Marriage, and Death among Muslims in the Netherlands (Peeters, 2011) and "Thinking for Oneself? Forms and Elements of Religious Authority in Dutch Muslim Women's Groups", in Women, Leadership, and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority, edited by Masooda Bano and Hilary Kalmbach (Brill, 2012), and co-editor of Everyday Lived Islam in Europe (Ashgate, 2013), among other publications.