Z. Fareen Parvez

Home institution

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Research project

Women, Trauma, and the Islamic Sciences of Healing: A Case Study of Jinn Possession in Morocco

The project examines the global revival and state suppression of the “Islamic sciences of healing” through a qualitative case study based in Morocco. It explores how women become central to debates about Islamic reform and how possession becomes a site to manage gender relations and trauma.

Profile

Z. Fareen Parvez is Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Massachusetts Amherst and was a 2019-20 fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her work uses ethnographic and other qualitative methods to explore the political, economic, and religious lives of working-class communities. She is the author of Politicizing Islam: the Islamic revival in France and India (2017, Oxford University Press). The book draws on two years of participant observation among Muslim communities in Lyon, France, and Hyderabad, India, and analyzes how different types of secularism impact minority mobilization.

In addition to her research on gender and possession in Morocco, her current research looks at predatory lending and household debt in urban India. This work draws on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation among Muslim and Dalit communities.

Her writing has appeared in such publications as Newsweek, Salon, The Guardian, and LA Times among others. Her work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Society for the Social Scientific Study of Religion, and the Network for the Social Scientific Study of Science and Religion.

As a committed public sociologist and activist, Parvez writes with the Debt Justice Working Group of the Progressive International and for various community and activist organizations.