Abstract

Advancing communal cohesion is challenged when vulnerable displaced peoples arrive to a host country, and then face a number of new obstacles while trying to integrate. They struggle to be acknowledged as legal residents or citizens, deserving of dignity, acceptance, and a life beyond a marginalised existence. They often have to fight to be employed, to have a voice in the new country, to be able to advocate for their family, to forge community with others, and to feel as though they belong.

PIF in collaboration with Belong Aotearoa welcomes you to join us as international guest speaker Professor Sophia Pandya shares her experiences and research on this topic.

Sophia Pandya is a professor and department chair at California State University at Long Beach, in the Department of Religious Studies. Winner of the 2016 Advancement of Women Award at CSULB from the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, she received her BA from UC Berkeley in Near Eastern Studies/Arabic, and her MA and PhD from UC Santa Barbara in Religious Studies. A Fulbright Scholar, she specializes in women and Islam, and more broadly in contemporary movements within Islam. Dr. Pandya has authored a book (2012), Muslim Women and Islamic Resurgence: Religion, Education, and Identity Politics in Bahrain, on Bahraini women and the ways in which globalization and modern education impacted their religious activities. Having carried out research in Turkey on several occasions, she is also the co-editor of a second published volume (2012), The Gülen Hizmet Movement and its Transnational Activities: Case Studies on Charitable Activism. Dr. Pandya has also published about the Hizmet movement and its relationship to the Kurdish community, “Hizmet Educational Institutions and the Kurdish Community: Assimilation vs. Identity Politics,” and an article about family and gender in wartime Yemen, “The War Took Us Backwards”: Yemeni Families and Dialectical Patriarchal Reordering.” She is currently working on a book on the stories of Turkish refugees, and the meanings they find or construct from their ordeal.