Face Veils, Face Masks and Selective Liberal Anxieties

Professor Annelies Moors emerita at the University of Amsterdam

Face Veils, Face Masks and Selective Liberal Anxieties, a Talk by Professor Annelies Moors emerita at the University of Amsterdam.

Since 1 August 2019 a ban on all face-coverings (the legal term used for face-veiling) in the education and health sectors, in public building, and in public transportation has been implemented in the Netherlands. An exception was made for face-coverings for health reasons. Nine months later, with Covid19, wearing face-masks became mandatory in public transportation. It was , however, explicitly stated that only non-medical face-masks were allowed. In this talk Professor Annelies Moors will trace the debates about face-veiling and about face-masks and explore the selective liberal anxieties they express.

Bio:

Annelies Moors studied Arabic at the University of Damascus and Arabic and anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. She held the chair for contemporary Muslim societies at the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Currently she is professor emerita at the University of Amsterdam.

From 2001-2008 she has been the Amsterdam chair of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World. She has held visiting positions at the University of San’a, Yemen, and was Honorably Visiting Professor at the London School of Fashion (London University of the Arts). She was the primary investigator of an international NORFACE research programme on The emergence of Islamic fashion in Europe, and of the NWO Cultural Dynamics programme on Islamic cultural practices and performances: New youth cultures in Europe. Until early 2020 she was the primary investigator of the NWO programme Muslim Activism in the Netherlands after 1989 (senior researcher: Martijn de Koning) and of the ERC advanced grant Problematizing "Muslim Marriages": Ambiguities and Contestations

She has published widely on gender, nation and religion in such fields as Muslim family law and Islamic marriages, wearing gold, the visual media (postcards of Palestine), migrant domestic labor, Islamic fashion, and wearing face-veils.

Register for this free event via Evenbrite.

Organiser: Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies

Contact email: rs94@soas.ac.uk