Humanities and Social Sciences

Not another hijab row: New conversations on gender, race, religion and the making of communities

A National Conference sponsored by Trans/forming Cultures: Key Centre for Communication and Culture, UTS.

Saturday & Sunday, 9th & 10th December 2006.
Building 2, Room 429, Broadway Campus,
The University of Technology, Sydney (enter via main Tower Building, Broadway)

Download the "Not Another Hijab Row" conference flier here. (pdf)
Download a programme of events here. (Excel)
Abstracts of the presentations can be downloaded here. (pdf)
Registration is essential and can be done online here before the 1st December.

Despite a decade of 'race debates' in Australia, analyses of the intersections between gender, race and religion remain all but absent in the public sphere. In recent years Muslim women in particular have been subjected to intense public scrutiny, yet these controversies have largely been limited to provocative comments on the hijab and sharia law. Such narrow debates have served to silence the experiences and the concerns of Muslim women and of scholars and community workers who engage the intersections of gender, race and religion.

This conference seeks to establish a space for constructive dialogue around the perspectives which are marginalised in public discussions, focusing on how gender, race and religion have long been deployed in the construction of Australian national identity, and are particularly evident in current representations of 'aggressive' and 'misogynistic' Islam as the ultmate alien other in 'tolerant' Judeo-Christian Australia. In minority communities, questions over community leadership, representation, and responses to racism have often revolved around constructions of culture, faith and gender roles.

The conference will provide a forum for papers and presentations from all disciplinary perspectives in order to build a conversation across spectra of belief, scholarship and community. Rather than another 'hijab debate', the conference will explore the intersections of gender, race and religion in regards to:

 

For more information contact:


Following "Not another hijab row" is
The Borderpolitics of Whiteness, 11th - 13th December, 2006