A table with religious pamphlets and statues outside a shop

Focusing on gender, religion and culture

Our research explores the experiences and expression of diversity and the tensions that have emerged in and between contemporary societies.

Members

Anna-Karina Hermkens (co-convenor), Jaap Timmer (co-convenor), Amanda Wise, Banu Senay, Chris Houston, Jumana Bayeh , Ian Tregenza, Selvaraj Velayutham, Jyhene Kebsi, Randa Abdel-Fattah, Rebecca Sheehan, Andrew Burridge .

About our research

A religious group singing and dancing We analyse the inequalities and discrimination resulting from the intersections of gender with other social identity categories, and explore religious and cultural diversity, focusing on the lived experiences of co-existence in our cities, leisure spaces, and workplaces.

The relationships between gender, religion, culture, and the state animates our work on religious polities and social movements, moral communities, faith, state bureaucracies, secularism, and religious freedom.

We also address forces shaping global migration including labour, supply-chains, economic and social aspirations of migrants, involuntary migration and resettlement, as well as mechanisms to control, channel and curtail people movement at national, regional and global levels.

Our research spans Australia, Turkey, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Solomon Islands, India, Singapore, Tunisia, and the US.

Key research areas include:

  • religion, culture, state and society
  • liberalism, secularism, multiculturalism, religious freedom, and discrimination
  • faith communities and social movements
  • religious chauvinism, nationalisms, racisms, and identarian movements
  • gender, intersectionality, and inequalities
  • conflict and everyday co-existence in diverse societies (cultures, religions, race)
  • global migration and human mobility - including forced migration, labour migration, elite mobilities; forces prompting these flows and state responses to them; experiences and survival strategies of migrants, consequences for receiving and sending societies
  • global cities, diversity and urban life
  • global flows and transformations of tangible and intangible cultural forms, including the movement and encounters between ideas, moral communities, values, commodities, material cultures, food, music, and media.

Anna-Karina Hermkens’ ARC Discovery Project Faith in Development: Religion, Gender and Resource Extraction in PNG explores the interplay between faith and eco-conflict (tensions surrounding logging and mining) in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville.

Jaap Timmer is currently engaged in a Senior Fellowship at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (October 2021- April 2023) where he is formulating a theory on how pasts emerge as people’s futures change and make demands on the past, especially in situations in which religion significantly informs people’s lifeworlds.

Banu Senay’s current ARC Discovery Project titled ‘Islamic Bureaucracies and Pious Publics in Turkey and Indonesia’ explores how state resources are applied for political goals in the field of Islam in Turkey and Indonesia. Banu also has ongoing research on Islamic sonic practices and art pedagogies in Istanbul. This research engages with debates in anthropology around skilled learning, ethics, and cultural politics in the Middle East as outlined in her monograph Musical Ethics and Islam. She has continuing research in the areas of diaspora studies, nationalism, and transnational religion and is co-editor of Routledge's forthcoming Handbook of Turkey’s Diasporas.

Ian Tregenza’s co-authored book Reason, Religion and the Australian Polity: A Secular State? (Routledge, 2019) was the outcome of an ARC discovery project. He is currently engaged in projects on the history of Australian liberalism, the history of the secular, and debates on religious freedom.

Andrew Burridge is involved in the project Language Inclusion Index (LI-Index): A tool to evaluate inclusion in multilingual Australia involvingAlice Chik, Marc Orlando, Sue Ollerhead, Lauren Gorfinkel, Yuanyuan Gu. The LI-Index is a survey tool, currently in development, for organizations to self-assess the degree to which their clients, customers, or users are included or excluded by factors of language.  Andrew's also works on undocumented migration, the effects of border securitisation and immigration detention, as well as asylum and refugee reception and settlement.

Rebecca Sheehan’s book project, Rise of the Superwoman: How Sex Remade Gender in America’s Long 1970s (under contract with Harvard University Press) investigates the historical origins of contemporary expectations that women must combine motherhood, careers, and active sexuality.

Selvaraj Velayutham, Amanda Wise, Kristine Aquino have an ARC Discovery project on Social Resilience, Migrant Integration and Informal Sport in Public Space (2022-2024) which explores the importance of public space and leisure in strengthening individual and community well-being. The project investigates the potential of informal sport in fostering social resilience and cohesion in new migrant communities by analysing how social outcomes are shaped by public spaces and built environments in Australia and Singapore.

Amanda Wise is involved in the Vertical Villages: Community, Place and Urban Density (funded by Churches Housing NSW, Baptist Care, Macquarie University Enterprise Partnership Scheme) with Miriam Williams, Emma Mitchell, and Kristian Ruming (associate Investigator).  The project explores current resident experiences of belonging in existing multicultural high-rise developments.

Aquino, K., Wise, A. Velayutham, S. Keith D. Parry & Sarah Neal (2020) The right to the city: outdoor informal sport and urban belonging in multicultural spaces, Annals of Leisure Research.

Bond, N. and Timmer, J. 2017. Wondrous Geographies and Historicity for State-Building on Malaita, Solomon Islands. Journal of Religious and Political Change 3, 3: 136-151.

Burridge, A. and Gill, N., 2017. Conveyor-Belt Justice: Precarity, access to justice, and uneven geographies of legal aid in UK asylum appeals, Antipode 49, 1: 23-42.

Fisher, D.X.O., Burridge, A., and Gill, N., 2019. The political mobilities of reporting: tethering, slickness, and asylum control, Mobilities 14, 5: 632-647. 

Hermkens, A. 2021. Rosaries and Statues: Mediating Divine Intervention in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. Religions 12: 376. 

Hermkens, A. 2020. Charismatic Catholic Renewal in Papua New Guinea: Revisiting the Power of Marian devotion as a cultural and national force. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 31, 2: 152-169.

Kebsi, J. 2020. Bridging the Mediterranean without Papers: Tunisian Francophone Illiterature’s Representation of Irregular Immigration in the Age of Globalization.” The Journal of North African Studies 25, 6:980-994.

Kebsi, J. “Transnational Gendered (Im)mobility in Border Cinema: Iraqi Refugee Women in Australia.” Law & Literature.

Senay, B. & Houston, C. 2022. Musical Intimacy, Model Citizenship, and Sufism in the Life of Niyazi Sayin. International Journal of Middle East Studies 54, 2, 225-242.

Senay, B. 2020. Musical Ethics and Islam. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Senay, B. 2015. Masterful Words: Musicianship and Ethics in Learning the Ney. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21: 524-41. 

Suryawan, I Ngurah and J. Timmer. 2022. Countering Imperialism: Two intersecting anthropologies of Papuan histories. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous People 18(2).

Timmer, J. 2015. Heirs to Biblical Prophecy: The All Peoples Prayer Assembly in Solomon Islands. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 18(4): 16-34. (Awarded the second place prize for the Thomas Robbins Award For Excellence in the Study of New Religious Movements)

Tregenza, I. (forthcoming) Religion, science and popular beliefs. In J. McDonald, & T. Wandel (Eds.), A cultural history of historiography in the Age of Empire, 1800-1920 (A Cultural History of Historiography; Vol. 5). Bloomsbury Publishing.

Tregenza, I. 2021 Herbert Brookes and the Crisis of Cultural Protestantism. In M. Maddox (ed.) Charles Strong's Australian Church: Christian Social Activism 1885-1917. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press.

Sheehan, Rebecca J. 2021 ‘One woman’s failure affects every woman’s chances’: Stereotyping Impossible Women Directors in 1970s Hollywood. Women’s History Review 30, 3: 483-505. 

Sheehan, Rebecca J. 2019 Intersectional Feminist Friendship: Restoring Colour to the Second Wave Through the Letters of Florynce Kennedy and Germaine Greer. Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, 25, 2019, 76-92. 

Wise, A. and Velayutham, S. 2014. Conviviality in everyday multiculturalism: Some brief comparisons between Singapore and Sydney, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 17, 4: 406–430. 

Wise, Amanda., 2022. Superdiversity and the everyday. In Oxford Handbook of Superdiversity. Oxford University Press.

Velayutham, Selvaraj. and Devadas, V., 2021. Tamil Cinema in the Twenty-First Century. London and New York: Routledge.

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E: Macquarie School of Social Sciences