Essays

Religion is part of how societies confront environmental change: through shared narratives of a lost past, confidence in particular sources of moral authority, reliance on faith-based civil society organizations, etc. Scholarly literature and media coverage have, over the past two decades, explored the various ways that religious traditions, communities, and organizations come to bear on […]

Introduction In the spring of 2018, I boarded a night train that would take me from Ulaanbaatar central station to Sainshand, the capital of Dornogovi province in the southeast of Mongolia. A good portion of the crowd was other women in their thirties, many still wearing their business casual office attire and herding a few […]

In the Andean highlands of Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina a multiplicity of forces pulse through the land. The creatures and entities inhabiting it have long transformed this seemingly arid landscape into a vibrant web of vitality. As the world races towards electromobility (ostensibly to address our climate emergency[1]), this region is being recast as a […]

Electricity can save us from the climate emergency. This is an article of faith for those seriously committed to decarbonizing the world’s energy system. Why? Electricity is the only viable alternative energy infrastructure that exists globally today. It has co-existed and co-evolved with fossil fuels for over a century in most parts of the world. […]

In a period of rapid social change, political polarization, and emerging threats to democracy worldwide, scholars are rightly turning their attention to democratic renewal. What sustains people as they work on the project of living together in increasingly diverse and pluralistic societies? Last year, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) brought together a cohort of […]

In June 2018, I entered the headquarters of an Islamic bank, nestled among Istanbul’s skyscrapers, ready to discover the world of global Islamic finance. Besides chasing my own doubts (what could be Islamic about banking anyway?), I was motivated by what I considered a feminist agenda to conduct research on Muslim men and their invisible […]

In this article, we provide an overview of “The Art of Knowing” project, a pedagogical intervention and research project that utilizes Indigenous Muslim storywork as a foundation for an extracurricular elementary school science curriculum. Through our educational experiment [1],  we intentionally designed a learning space that placed Muslim ways of knowing and learning at the […]