Research Programme 2020-2024
ZMO’s research programme, entitled Thinking through Translocal Entanglements: Perspectives from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, explores and analyses the ways in which social actors address and negotiate tensions and challenges related to diverse aspects of translocal connectivity in their experience, perception and practice. This is pursued with regard to the fact that their communities are themselves shaped (often characteristically) by specific histories of such connectivity and the tensions related to it. In terms of historical dimensions, the research is conceived against the backdrop of globalising networks, largely from the perspective of Muslim agents and communities (and their respective counterparts) from the 16th to the 21st centuries. Further dimensions to be explored concern existential experiences and transformations of social practice; spatial (re-)configurations; conceptual frameworks, visions and revisions within such entanglements; economic relations; and formations and re-formations of the religious, the legal, and the political.