2002-03 Rockefeller Visiting Fellows Study Religion, Women and Conflict in South Asia

The Kroc Institute's Program in Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding (PRCP) welcomes its second group of Rockefeller Foundation Visiting Fellows. This year's pro-gram focuses on the relationship between religion and con-flict in South Asia, with a particular emphasis on the role of women. The program is supported through a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships program. Further information about the program, includ-ing application information for the 2003-04 academic year, is available on our website at www.nd.edu/~krocinst/visitingfellows.

MOHAMMED ABU-NIMER (Spring semester 2003), a conflict resolution specialist in the School of International Service, American University, received a Ph.D. from George Mason University in 1993. He is the author of Dialogue, Conflict Resolution and Change: The Case of Arabs and Jew in Israel (SUNY Press, 1999) and Reconciliation, Coexistence, and Justice in Interethnic Conflicts (New York: Lexington, 2001). He has received several awards for his research, including grants from the United States Institute of Peace and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Since 1990 he has conducted nearly one hundred workshops in conflict reso-lution, multiculturalism, religion and peacebuilding in conflict areas such as Gaza, West Bank, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland, Mindanao (Philippines) and Guatemala. Abu-Nimer examines Islamic resources for nonviolent conflict resolution.

LAMIA KARIM received a Ph.D. in anthropology from Rice University in 2001. Her dissertation, entitled "Development and Its Discontents: NGOs, Women and the Politics of Social Mobilization in Bangladesh," received the Gardner Award for Best Dissertation in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Rice University. Her innovative research has garnered several awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship for Dissertation Research, a Guggenheim Foundation Dissertation grant, and a previous Rockefeller Fellowship at the University of Hawaii. Karim examines the struggle over civil society in Bangladesh by focusing on an ethnographic and historical study of militant Islam in contemporary Bangladesh, its Wahabi madrassah educa-tional system, and its contested relationship with the women's rights movement in the country.

PATRICIA LAWRENCE received a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology in 1997 from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she now teaches. Lawrence's work explores how the Tamil minority living in Sri Lanka's eastern war zone copes with torture, disappear-ance, poverty, displacement, and viola-tions of fundamental human rights through creative forms of religious rituals. Lawrence focuses, in particular, on the role of Hindu oracles. Her articles and chapters in edited volumes present fine-grained studies of altered lives and everyday realities changed by years of ethnic violence. She has received several awards, including an SSRC-MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship. She also has served as consultant for documentary films based on her ethnographic research, and has been a con-sultant to organizations in the region working on develop-ment, peacebuilding, women's issues and human rights.

MONIQUE SKIDMORE received a Ph.D. in anthropology from McGill University in Montreal in 1999. Her research earned several awards and grants including a Wenner-Gren disser-tation fieldwork grant and the H.B.M. Murphy Prize for Medical Anthropology. Skidmore is currently a lecturer at the School of Anthropology, Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She will examine how Burmese women engage Theravada Buddhism and Nat Spiritism to mediate fear, violence, and vulnerability in everyday life. She is one of only a few scholars who has been able to conduct field-work in rural and peri-urban Burma (Myanmar), and has published articles on women's health, violence and fear in Burma, and on Buddhist methods of peacebuilding and community reconciliation in Cambodia.

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