Professor Yafa Shanneik

Yafa Shanneik's research pushes the boundaries of how Islam, gender and migration are studied and understood in the 21st century.

Shanneik's work examines the intersections of religion, female agency and mobility across Europe and the Middle East, with a particular focus on the creative and transnational forms of resistance developed by Muslim women. She has conducted extensive multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork among Muslim women across the Levant, Arab Gulf countries, Iran and various European countries. A distinctive feature of her work is the use of immersive and arts-based methodologies. She integrates body-mapping, augmented reality and virtual reality to co-produce knowledge with displaced communities and to foreground lived experiences of displacement, agency and resistance.

She has secured research funding from the European Research Council (ERC), the British Academy and various other national public and private funders in Europe. She currently leads the ERC Consolidator Grant for her project “Governing Health, Family and Religion: The Biopolitics of Genetic Counselling and Religious Family Formations (RELI-GENE)” (ERC-2024-COG no. 101171587). This project investigates how state-led genetic healthcare policies intersect with religious norms and cultural expectations within close-knit religious minority communities, including Jewish, Christian and Muslim groups, particularly around practices of consanguinity and endogamy. Through comparative research across Europe and the Middle East, RELI-GENE develops a new approach in understanding how states, communities and individuals negotiate reproductive practices and family-formation in contexts of rapid biomedical change.

• Islam, gender and migration
• Ritual practices and materialities
• Female embodiment and performativity
• Muslim women’s transnational resistance movements
• Theoretical conceptualisation of women’s empowerment and agency
• Biopolitics of genetic counselling and family-formations across religious traditions
• Immersive and arts-based research methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences