Prof. Anver Emon recently landed a prestigious grant from the University of Toronto’s Connaught Fund.
The grant will fund the Connaught Summer Institute on Islamic Studies, August 12-22, 2013. The institute is a partnership between the Faculty of Law and Emmanuel College, and Emon is designing the program with Mark Toulouse, principal of Emmanuel College.
The Summer Institute aims to attract graduate students, post-doctoral candidates and faculty from the university and elsewhere to explore subject areas in Islamic and Muslim studies through a unique pedagogy that draws upon the backdrop of our city’s diverse Muslim communities.
“Toronto is home to a wide range of communities, all of which co-exist in an expansive, but nonetheless defined geographic space,” says Emon. “Among those communities is a vibrant, diverse, and at times even fractious, Muslim population--Sunnis, Ismaili Shi’a, Twelver Shi’a, and Ahmadis, from South Asia, the Arab world, western India, China, and Africa. In addition, the city is home to an active LGBT Muslim community. Toronto provides a field of inquiry that will provoke fundamental discussions among the participants about the research subject(s) in Islamic studies, and the researcher’s relationship to that subject.”
The Summer Institute aims to attract graduate students, post-doctoral candidates and faculty from the university and elsewhere to explore subject areas in Islamic and Muslim studies through a unique pedagogy that draws upon the backdrop of our city’s diverse Muslim communities.
Scholarly discussions and critiques in class will be informed by trips to different communities in the GTA, and together will contribute to novel ways of designing research projects
The pedagogy draws upon the approach developed and implemented by the International Summer School of Religion and Public Life (ISSRPL) and its various affiliates in Uganda, Bostwana, and Bulgaria.
“The Summer Institute on Islamic Studies benefits from the international network that has formed around the ISSRPL, but also goes beyond it to explore the implications of this pedagogy upon advanced research in the field of Islamic studies at a time when the field itself is contending with the design and implication for research in a period of increased securitization concerning Islam and Muslims today,” Emon explains.
The grant is part of a list of projects funded by the $1 million Connaught Fund, U of T’s most prominent internal funding source.
View the Connaught Summer Institute on Islamic Studies website for further information.
Read about all the Connaught Fund competition winners here.
