Julie McBrien

Julie McBrien is a post-doctoral researcher at the ASSR. She was a PhD candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany and defended her dissertation at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in May of 2008. Her dissertation explored the politicization of Islam in southern Kyrgyzstan following the collapse of the USSR and its state-enforced atheism. Her research was particularly concerned with the effects of Soviet and post-Soviet modernization projects on conceptions of religion, politics, and ethno-national identity, and the way these impacted on the return of religion to the public sphere and the (re)construction of social life in a period of post-socialist decline.

McBrien’s current research, titled ‘Dreams and Disillusions of Young Muslim Women’, was begun as a post-doctoral project at the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) and has continued since January 1, 2009 at the ASSR. Having followed a group of Kyrgyz women for the last ten years, McBrien explores their shifting dreams of a fulfilling, adult life and charts how their attempted enactments of these fantasies have been blocked, altered or fulfilled. Love, marriage, and bride-kidnapping; work and children; and labor migration are the key themes in this exploration of young women’s lives. The project is funded by a Rubicon Grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

In January 2010, McBrien will take up the post of Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.

Selected Publications:

2009 “Mukadas’s dilemma: veils and modernity in Kyrgyzstan” the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), Volume 15, Supplement 1, May 2009, S127 S144.

2009 “Tolerating Diversity: Secularism and political Islam in Europe and Central Asia” in Corinna Hauswell, ed. Co-operation with Central Asia: The Potential of the EU's Central Asia Strategy. Loccum: Loccumer Protokolle.

2008       (with Mathijs Pelkmans) “Turning Marx on his head: missionaries, ‘extremists,’ and archaic secularists in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan,” Critique of Anthropology 28(1), pp. 87–103.

2007       “Brazilian TV and Muslimness in Kyrgyzstan” ISIM Review19, Spring 2007, pp. 16-17.

2006a    “Extreme conversations: secularism, religious pluralism, and the rhetoric of Islamic extremism in southern Kyrgyzstan” in Chris Hann, et. Al.  The post-Socialist religious question: faith and power in Central Asia and East-Central Europe. Munich: Lit Verlag, pp. 47-73

2006b    “Listening to the wedding speaker: discussing religion and culture in southern Kyrgyzstan.” In Central Asian Survey 25(3), pp.341-357.