Date: September 28-29, 2017

Venue: Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of NOVA University of Lisbon (FCSH/NOVA), Lisbon, Portugal

The first Forum of Researchers in Islamic Contexts (FRIC) was held in January 2013. That year, we wanted to survey the studies that were documenting what appeared to us as a major transformation in the way of looking at the Arab and Islamic world. Today, so often in the hustle and bustle of generalizations and commonplaces, Islam holds a captive place in our mediated and Eurocentric daily lives.

But the curiosity about Islam, which we perceived to be happening at the beginning of this decade, seems to have given rise (again?) to mistrust. We see recurrent misinformed discourses, often conveyed in an essentialist and objectifying way, giving the motto to the proliferation of Islamophobic and xenophobic discourses. Islam is repeatedly projected, directly or indirectly, to the center of political and societal debates in Europe, as a metonymy that is useful for fueling the political agenda of the day, as well as the fears and anguish of a certain Europe perceiving itself in crisis.

The Forum is intended to give an account of the diversity of these contexts and their themes, in a meeting of scholars who reflect and problematize about issues related to the Islamic contexts through researches carried out in Portugal or in other contexts.

We therefore call for proposals of studies from different disciplinary fields addressing these issues through texts/fieldwork/archives/images that can contribute to the multiplicity of discourses, practices, histories, beliefs, daily life and subjectivities that constitute the Islamic contexts.

Conference languages: Portuguese and English (there will be no interpretation available)

 For more information, read the flyer.

Source: The Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA)