Sultan Doughan

SULTAN DOUGHAN, then a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, California, was awarded a grant in April 2016 to aid research on ‘Genealogies of Belonging: Citizenship and Religious Difference in Contemporary Germany,’ supervised by Dr. Saba Mahmood. Funding supported this research in the domain of civic education in Berlin on the question of citizenship incorporation for racialized religious minorities. Civic education as a supplemental field to public education is defined by the memory of the Holocaust and the specter of fascism. In the last decade additional funds were allocated to combat Islamic extremism as a form of political ideology lingering within immigrant communities and proliferating. The guiding question for fieldwork has been how civic tolerance is taught by civic educators of immigrant backgrounds, mostly of Palestinian and Turkish descent, to youth of heterogeneous immigrant backgrounds grouped as Muslims. The research was organized around two organizations, one social movement and one neighborhood community organization and conducted in different stages over the course of fieldwork. By focusing on teaching strategies and interactions between female civic educators and students, the researcher has generated data that contours a form of Islam and a Muslim subject both shaped by the practices in civic education and yet excluded as dangerous to society. The research data bespeaks the ongoing pedagogy, embodiment and performance of citizenship as a secular practice and the anxiety to fail that ideal.