Who has the right to a secure life? [EN]

Nadia Fadil works as an Associate Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at KU Leuven. She studied sociology and anthropology, and obtained a PhD in Social Sciences in 2008 at KU Leuven on a thesis entitled Submitting to God, Submitting to the Self. Secular and Religious trajectories of second-generation Belgian Maghrebi (supervisors: Rudi Laermans & Karel Dobbelaere). After her PhD, she was affiliated as a Postdoctoral Jean Monnet Research Fellow at the European University Institute (2008-2009) and an FWO Postdoctoral Researcher at KU Leuven (2009-2012). She has also been a Visiting Fellow at the University of California Berkeley (2011-2012) and a Fulbright Fellow at Columbia University (2018). She is currently the Program Director and Head of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology. 

She holds a broad interest on the articulations and transformations of religion and race in a global context. Her own research centers on Islam in Europe (with France, Belgium and the Netherlands as ethnographic site), which she examines both as a living tradition as well as an object of regulation. She draws on this empirical question to reflect on a vast set of theoretical issues such as religion and spirituality, subjectivity and power, ethical selfhood, the body, postcoloniality, governmentality, race and secularism. Additionally, and throughout her different projects, she also works on reimagining ethnography as a site of possibilities, collaboration and solidarity, around which she has launched and co-organizes the seminar series Doing Research Otherwise. She is open to supervise PhD and postdoctoral projects that sit at the intersection of these different themes. 

Nadia Fadil's most recent publications include Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions. European configurations (with Monique Scheer and Birgitte Scheplern Johansen, Bloomsbury 2019), Radicalization in Belgium and the Netherlands. Critical perspectives on Violence and Security (with Martijn de Koning and Francesco Ragazzi, IB Tauris 2019) and a special issue in Contemporary Islam "Envisioning Hijra. The Ethics of leaving and dwelling of European Muslims" (with Annelies Moors and Karel Arnaut, 2021). 

She is the PI of several ongoing and past research projects on the nexus of religion, migration and race. Amongst them are: Redefining ‘home’: Transnational practices of European Muslims in Montréal and the United Arab Emirates (PI, KU Leuven OT/14/030, 2015-2019) and Deradicalizing the city. Policy assemblage, security and home-making in Brussels, EUrope and Marseille (PI, KU Leuven IDN/20/004, 2020-2024 and FWO/G0D8521N, 2021-2025). She is furthermore involved as a co-promoter in two BELSPO funded projects: ‘Folk, Authority and Radicalism’ (BELSPO, 2016-2022), where she examined the development, negotiation and effects of counter-radicalisation policies at the local level, and REGUIDE: A Holistic, Restorative, and Gendered Approach to Guide Returnees to their Home Countries (2021-2025). 

She is also a member of the editorial board of the journals Social Compass, Maronnages. Les Questions Raciales au cribles des Sciences Sociales and Re-Orient. The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies.

Adam Elliott-Cooper is a lecturer in social and public policy in the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London. He is author of Black Resistance to British Policing, and sits on the board of The Monitoring Group, and an organisation challenging state racism and racial violence.

Dr. Kojo Koram is a Reader in Law at Birkbeck School of Law, University of London. He joined Birkbeck in September 2018. Prior to taking up this role, he was a Lecturer at the School of Law at the University of Essex between 2016-2018.

He was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2011 and then received his PhD in 2017. In 2018, the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities awarded his PhD the Julien Mezey Dissertation Award for the dissertation that most promises to enrich and advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of law, culture and the humanities.

In 2022, he published his debut book Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire (John Murray 2022) which was nominated for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing.

Alongside his academic work, Kojo has also written for publications as varied as the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, Dissent and the New Statesman.

Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa is a doctor of political science and former Africa editor at MO*. She has Rwandan parents, was born in Brussels, grew up in Antwerp and now lives in the United Kingdom, where she (previously taught International Development Cooperation at the University of Portsmouth, and now) teaches as Assistant Professor of Human Rights and Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).