Becker Publishes in Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Department News
January 16, 2017

Graduate student Elisabeth Becker has an article forthcoming in the leading academic journal for religious studies, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion entitled “Good mosque/bad mosque: Boundaries to belonging in contemporary Germany.” Drawing on over two years of field work at multiple sites, as well as on interviews with mosque leadership, the paper examines how Muslim institutions in Europe relate to national and European values, and shows that the strategic presentation of both form and function by Muslim communities interacts with constraining environmental factors in delineating possibilities of belonging. This leads to the labeling of mosques as “good” or “bad”–evoking the “good Muslim”/”bad Muslim” binary.  Elisabeth is a junior fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology and the Center for Comparative Research.