*POSTPONED* 1st International Conference on Critical Muslim Studies: ReOrienting the Post-Western

Dear Conference Participants,

Many thanks for your continued patience in regards to the Critical Muslim Studies conference. We appreciate your support whilst we have tried to bring this event to you during the challenging times of a global pandemic. As you are aware this event was moved from the original planned date to a new date in April 2021 and we have continued to monitor the situation ensuring we follow the Government Guidelines at all times to ensure student, visitor, and staff safety.

Following a meeting with the committee earlier this week we made the difficult but necessary decision to postpone this event once again and can confirm that the April date will no longer be happening here on Campus. We appreciate this is disappointing, but we are keen to host this conference in person to allow the best experience for everyone and at this time there is no way that we can deliver this safely, taking into consideration peoples international travel requirements, continued changes to the virus and social distancing needs.

At this time, we are looking to move the event to 2022 where we hope restrictions will be removed or minimal and we will of course advise you of a date as soon as we have been able to confirm the logistics here on Campus. Until then we hope to bring you some smaller online sessions beginning in April time - details of which will follow.

Thank you again for your continued support and we do hope that you remain safe and well during these challenging times. If you have any queries please contact Sarah McLaughlin (Events).

S. Sayyid

Chair in Social Theory and Decolonial Thought
Head of School of Sociology and Social Policy

To mark the 5th anniversary of the journal ReOrient, the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies at the University of Leeds will host the first international conference on Critical Muslim Studies.

The current proliferation of the ‘critical’ as a prefix in an ever-increasing range of fields and sites addressing an engaging an epistemological and methodological problem has long presented a challenge and opportunity to advance legacies in shaping our understanding of the world. A disparity of efforts, however, is discernible among scholars grappling in different fields against the impasses of positivism, presentism and the entrenchment of disciplines in epistemic cages forged as part of Europe’s worldmaking.

The key touchstones of Critical Muslim Studies, emphasise scholarship that is non-positivist, and conceptually rigorous. It is an approach that includes being attentive to racial formations and processes of racialisation; engaging with comparative and transnational context and processes on a global scale, and mapping out non-linear histories, discontinuities and genealogies.

This international and interdisciplinary conference aims to bring into conversation researchers who may not necessarily identify themselves as doing Critical Muslim Studies but share some of the same concerns and interests and recognise the need for epistemic decolonisation.