Rachel Silvey, an assistant professor in CU-Boulder's geography department, has been awarded a Fulbright New Century Scholars Award to study gender relations in Islam.
Silvey was one of 31 scholars chosen from around the world to participate in the program and is the only recipient of the award in the state of Colorado. The team of scholars will focus on the theme "Toward Equity: The Global Empowerment of Women."
She will travel to Jakarta, Indonesia, and Los Angeles to examine Islamic women's place in their religion, and who "belongs and who is excluded." Indonesia has the world's largest population of Muslims and Los Angeles has the largest population of Indonesian Muslims in the United States.
Silvey hopes that by collaborating with scholars of Islam in Indonesia and Los Angeles, she will be able to provide firsthand accounts of these issues for her students and colleagues when she returns to the University of Colorado at Boulder.
"What I'm most excited about is the opportunity to effectively challenge misrepresentation of Islam," Silvey said. "There are numerous misconceptions about gender in Islam, and these are particularly widespread and dangerous in the post-9/11 geopolitical context.
"There is a negative, inaccurate stereotype, often used for political gain, that suggests that Muslim women need most crucially to be liberated from their families and their religion," Silvey said. "And there's an assumption that liberal Westerners know what freedom is and are bringing it to the world. Women get used in this discourse. Researchers and educators need to contribute to dispelling these myths by providing more accurate and complete representations of the role that religion and gender play in contemporary geopolitical debates."
Silvey became interested in the topic in 1994 when working on her dissertation on gender, migration and development in Indonesia.
In its third year, the Fulbright New Century Scholars Program is designed to draw from the synergy created when scholars from vastly different backgrounds focus on a single issue of concern to people worldwide. The New Century Scholars Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in a partnership with the Council for International Exchange of Scholars.