International Research Collaboratives
Organizers
Melanie Adrian, Ioanna Tourkochoriti
This collaborative will explore the impasses in using legal or social rules to force women either to wear or remove headscarves. It brings together scholars whose research interests are focused on the Middle East, Northern Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America and Europe, and come from a variety of disciplines including sociology, law, anthropology, political science, history and religious studies. Some have described how, in the Middle East, dress choices are dictated by inegalitarian power dynamics. Other scholars focusing on Europe and North America have been criticizing the paternalistic attitude dominant in European states against dress decisions that might be dictated on the basis of religious convictions.