Noor Amr

Grant Type

Dissertation Fieldwork Grant

Institutional Affiliation

Stanford U.

Grant number

Gr. 10401

Approve Date

October 11, 2022

Project Title

Amr, Noor (Stanford U.) "Church Asylum: Religion, Migration, and the Boundaries of Political Belonging"

NOOR AMR, then a graduate student at Stanford University, Stanford, California, was awarded funding in October 2022 to aid “Church Asylum: Religion, Migration, and the Boundaries of Political Belonging,” supervised by Dr. Kabir Tambar. The project focused on church asylum (Kirchenasyl) in Germany, or the practice by which churches and monasteries shelter rejected asylum-seekers threatened with deportation. Through participant observation, interviews, institutional ethnography, and archival research, the project traced contemporary church-state contestations surrounding Christian sanctuary against the backdrop of heightened anti-migrant politics and EU border militarization. Accompanying and living among migrants during their sanctuary tenure in Protestant and Catholic churches as well as a Benedictine monastery, the grantee explored how people seeking asylum made themselves legible for Christian sanctuary from the state, precisely to present themselves to federal immigration authorities as subjects worthy of political recognition and belonging. The project illuminates how religious-secular contestations become animated through questions of migrant belonging, posing timely questions about religious difference, secularism, sovereignty, and the complex terrain of theological bordering/boundary-making in an increasingly fortified Europe.