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Rachel Silvey
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 Assistant
Professor, Geography Department
Universityof Colorado, United States
Research: Gender and Transnational Islam: Social Networks,
Religious Spaces and Indonesian-US Migration
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Dr. Rachel Silvey is Assistant Professor of Geography and
Research Associate at the Population Program, Institute
of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Her research interests include gender and feminist geography,
migration studies, transnational Islam, critical development
studies, and Indonesia. She is currently a member of the
International Migration Program's Working Group on Gender
and Migration of the Social Science Research Council. (http://www.ssrc.org/programs/intmigration/working_groups/gender/index.page)
Her work has appeared in a range of journals, including
the Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
Political Geography, Progress in Human Geography, Women's
Studies International Forum, Gender, Place, and Culture,
and World Development, and work is forthcoming in the
Blackwell Companion to Feminist Geography and a volume on
gender geographies of Islam edited by Caroline Nagel and
Ghazi-Walid Falah.
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Gender and Transnational Islam: Social Networks,
Religious Spaces, and Indonesian-U.S. Migration
The central goal of this research is to provide a comparative,
in-depth analysis of changing conceptions of Islamist gendered
power and space in Los Angeles and Jakarta. Based on interviews
and participant-observation with Muslim Indonesian transnational
migrants, the research will explore the complex, often contradictory
repercussions of transnational migration for women, particularly
as they are refracted through Islam. Specifically, the project
will examine how Muslim transnational migrants in the two
cities produce and mobilize particular Islamic gender codes,
and what these new mappings imply about women's empowerment
in an international context.
The research will explore migrants' interpretations of
the web- and print-based representations of gender and Islam
circulated within and across the two urban and national
contexts, paying particular attention to the ways in which
religious subjectivities mediate the meanings of migration
and women's empowerment. As a whole, the research will address
both how transnational migration opens up new possibilities
for women's empowerment and more diverse interpretations
of religion, as well as the ways it is associated with emergent
forms of religious antagonism and restrictions on women's
mobility and power. The project builds on my longstanding
research on gender and migration in Indonesia, and extends
my recent research on Indonesian gender and Islam to address
migration in transnational context and Indonesian migrants'
linkages with the U.S.
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