Mayanthi Fernando works on Islam, secularism, and the politics of difference in the North Atlantic. Her current project tracks the secular genealogies of the recent posthumanist turn. Reading this scholarship alongside other traditions of nonhuman ontologies, including Islamic sciences of the unseen, she asks whether we might rethink “natureculture” as “supernatureculture.”
Mayanthi Fernando is an associate professor of Anthropology at UCSC, and the director of the Center For Emerging Worlds. Her current project attends to the nexus of sex and religion in the articulation of modern secularity, analyzing how the secular state’s project of regulating and transforming religious life is interwoven with its project of sexual normalization, i.e. the production of secular, sexually “normal” citizens. She is interested in how proper religion and proper sexuality are mutually constituted (often in opposition to each other) by secular rule.
Date/Time
April 18, 2018 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public
Venue/Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz