Global Humanities Junior Research and Teaching Stay at The Chinese University of Hong Kong

August - December 2016

Secularism, Islam, and Urban Development in Indonesia

Saskia Schäfer's research interests include Islam and politics in Indonesia and Malaysia, discourse and media analysis, religious and political authority, orthodoxy, secularism, public morality, Islamic feminism, and urban studies. Her new project addresses changes in the relationship of religion and politics in urban regions in Indonesia and Turkey. The project focuses on the increasing incorporation of religion into politics and its effect on the fraught notions of secularism in academic scholarship. It uses the lens of urban development to analyse the renegotiation of religious and secular space.

After holding a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Modern Southeast Asian Studies at the Weatherhead East Asia Institute at Columbia University, New York, in 2013/14, Saskia Schäfer has been a Fellow at the Dahlem Research School at Freie Universität Berlin, and at the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University. She received her PhD in Political Science from Freie Universität Berlin, and holds an M.A. in Southeast Asian Studies, Political Science, and Literature from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She is currently working on a book manuscript on Islam and orthodoxy in Indonesia and Malaysia. The book investigates the public discourses on the Ahmadiyya, Shia, and other Muslims deemed "deviant."

Saskia Schäfer can be reached at saskia.schaefer@fu-berlin.de