WOMEN’S PATHWAYS TO PROFESSIONALIZATION IN MUSLIM ASIA. RECONFIGURING RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE, GENDER, AND CONNECTIVITY

This project addresses the contemporary religion-profession nexus in Asia’s Muslim societies from the vantage point of vocational professionalization through religious knowledge. While empirically obvious, theoretical and conceptual clarity pertaining to this nexus is lacking. The project intends to bring forward exactly this. It links empirical observations of applied religious knowledge and the conceptualization of professionalization, examined through case studies from Southeast and Central Asia. The lens it looks through is intentionally gender-sensitive, exploring how Muslim women in Asia actively and creatively participate in the production and dissemination of religious knowledge and the formation of new knowledge societies through participation in social activism and the global economy on multiple scales. We ask what significance is bestowed on religious knowledge in women’s pathways to professions that are not genuinely associated with ‘the religious’. We stress connectivity and relationality between knowledge, religion and professionalization in a globalized economy, and in border-crossing settings that transcend the nation state, gender norms, institutionalized social orders, as well as the academically constructed boundaries of Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the MENA region (Middle East & North Africa). The overarching goal of the project is to establish a new thematic and conceptual field in gender-related research on professionalization and religion in Asia. By means of an integrative transdisciplinary and transregional approach, the project seeks to overcome the far-reaching regional and disciplinary compartmentalization in the field of study of Islam, women, work, and knowledge. These goals are to be achieved in two steps: a) conducting multi-sited, multi-perspective and de-centered empirical research in Southeast and Central Asia, and MENA as a reference site; b) establishing a sustainable network between scholars in Germany and Asia by implementing dialogical research and collaborative research formats. The ontological frame of our project project pays attention to the dynamic socio-spatial reconfiguration of religious knowledge, professionalization, and gender rather than the search for distinctive features of actors and situations in Southeast Asia and Central Asia. Accordingly, our research activities tie into the Shaping Asia Networking Initiative’s three central ‘Cs’ (connectivities, comparisons, collaborations; see 2.1 in Joint Project Application). They contribute to ‘shaping Asia’ in the sense of a co-creative and dynamic process of knowledge production, participation and self-positioning in the world, which unfolds, among other aspects, along gender lines. On an epistemic level, we scrutinize the hegemonic epistemologies that have constructed divisions of the Muslim world into an ‘Arab centre’ and ‘Asian and other peripheries’ by dialogical and collaborative research with our Asian partners.