Sonja van Wichelen

Sonja van Wichelen (1976) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University and a Research Fellow at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam. Areas of research and teaching interest include the study of identity politics in postcolonial societies, critical race studies, media studies, feminist and postcolonial theory. She received her MA in Social Sciences from Utrecht University with a concentration on Communication, Culture, and Identity and completed her final credits in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her MA thesis was a study into the May 1998 riots in contemporary Indonesia and explored discourses of race, class, and gender of the event’s mediated aftermath.

Van Wichelen wrote her PhD in Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. Her dissertation – entitled Embodied Contestations: Muslim Politics and Democratization in Indonesia through the Prism of Gender – focused on Islam and gender debates in times of political transition. The main aim of this research project was to disentangle social, political, and cultural complexities involved in public discussions and phenomena of Islam and gender in post-Suharto Indonesia. Four different cases were examined: the debate on female presidency, discussions on public sexuality, positions on veiling, and the dispute following pro-polygamy events. In the analyses of these debates, she concentrated on processes of meaning-making evident within representations of Muslim, nationalist, and feminist groups.

Her current post-doctoral research (funded by NWO-Rubicon) focuses on “international adoption” and examines adoption practices in the United States and the Netherlands. The aim of the research is to examine how adoption practices are informed by socioeconomic,

cultural, and political discourses and how they in turn contribute to shaping adoption paradigms in society.

http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/s.j.vanwichelen/