Andie Alexander, our new international doctoral candidate in the Institute for the Study of Religion, was awarded the Graduate Academy’s Exposé Scholarship for the period of April – September 2024 to develop her dissertation project, “Translating Difference: Individualism, Ideology, and the Making of Liberal Muslim Citizens.”
Alexander’s research examines the ways in which post-9/11 public discourses of inclusivity and tolerance implicitly marginalize and domesticate Islam in the US, UK, and Germany. Drawing on a few prominent public web resources about religious tolerance and pluralism, she analyzes how the promotion of “moderate” Islam—which is understood as inherently peaceful unlike its “radical” or “extremist” counterpart—as the so-called authentic representation of Islam masks the structural work of those discourses in creating an Islam that is easily domesticated and managed. Alexander investigates how these inclusivity discourses, in prioritizing a certain type of individual—understood as a distinct social actor who possesses personal, private knowledge of themselves as largely separate from (and sometimes in competition with) public, mediated knowledge—ultimately work as a form of governance and subject-making which construct and constrain the liberal Muslim subject.
Originally from the U.S., she earned her BA in Religious Studies & History at the University of Alabama (2012), her MA in Religious Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder (2017), and her MA in American Religions at Emory University (2022).
Alexander is co-editor (with Jason W. M. Ellsworth) of Fabricating Authenticity (Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2024). She is Managing Editor for The Religious Studies Project and is a member of the international scholarly collaborative Culture on the Edge.
Congratulations, Andie, on your award!
