Grants and Contracts Details
Description
In a world of global Islamist networks and identities, globalization can no longer be characterized
as a dialectical relationship between capitalist homogenization ("Me World") and its rejection
("Jihad"). Instead, a new geography is emerging, a "McJihad" within which global Islam and
global capitalism have become fused. The rise of a transnational industry for the design,
production, marketing, and sales of Islamic fashions for women ("veiling-fashion") is a prime
example of the ways in which neoliberal economic practices and consumption are becoming
intertwined with Muslim politics and culture. Going beyond traditional commodity chain research
to incorporate questions of meaning and identity, this study asks how the networks of veilingfashion
work to order geopolitical, geo-economic, and cultural spaces and identities. By
examining how circuits of veiling-fashion work to produce new Islamic geographies, this project
aims both to address questions of global importance and to produce empirically grounded
geographic theory.
The rise of the transnational veiling-fashion industry in Turkey has taken place within the context
of I) the restructuring of global commodity chains in apparel that has resulted, in part, from trade
liberalization and 2) the resurgence of Islamic identities worldwide. Turkey has been at the nexus
of both of these trends. In the past two decades, neoliberal economic reform has reoriented the
Turkish economy from the state-lcd, import-substitution industrialization towards open markets,
liberalized financial institutions, and production for export. In the wake of this broad economic
transformation, however, has followed a seeming paradox: the rise of Islam as an increasingly
prominent force in the public sphere of this secular, democratic state. Our project investigates the
intersection of Islamism and capitalism and its geopolitical and cultural implications through a
multi-sited case study of the new Turkish veiling-fashion industry and its transnational
connections to Berlin, Paris and Amsterdam.
This project has two primary objectives:
To analyze the scope, history, and geography of the veiling-fashion industry headquartered in
Turkey by tracing out the circuits of production, design, sales, and finance that characterize the
industry
To understand the implications of the production, sale, and consumption of veiling-fashion for
geopolitics, geo-economics, and identity formation in a transnational context.
These goals will be achieved through the execution of four research activities: a survey of the
veiling-fashion (tesettiir) industry in Turkey; interview-based case studies of three transnational
veiling-fashion companies with headquarters in Turkey (Tekbir, Aydan, and Diclc); focus groups
with consumers of Turkish veiling-fashion in Istanbul, Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam; and the
production and analysis of a veiling-fashion archive.
The intellectual merit of this research resides in its empirical and theoretical
contributions. This will be the first study of the structure and dynamics of the veiling-fashion
industry and the role of Islamic business practices, economic governance, and workplace
regulations at each stage in the global commodity chain. The results of this research will
contribute to postcolonial economic geographies that seek alternative vantage points on the
processes of globalization and to political geographic research on the transnationalization of
Islamic identities and practices. This research will have a broad impact because it will address
issues that are of great human and political significance, including the regulation of veiling in
Europe and Turkey and the ways in which Muslim women negotiate transnational identity
politics. Through the dissemination of results in prominent scholarly outlets, findings from this
research will have an impact on understandings of Islamic practices and identities in the global
arena, the geography of "McJihad" today. Because this research speaks to issues of broad human
interest, results will also be shared in the popular press through editorials.
Status | Finished |
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Effective start/end date | 8/1/07 → 1/31/12 |
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