Rate My Professor Yafa Shanneik

Shanneik leads the European Research Council Consolidator Grant project RELI-GENE: Governing Health, Family and Religion (ERC-2024-COG no. 101171587), which investigates how state-led genetic healthcare policies intersect with religious norms and cultural expectations in close-knit religious minority communities across Europe and the Middle East. She has authored the monograph The Art of Resistance in Islam: The Performance of Politics among Shi'i Women in the Middle East and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and co-edited volumes including Shiʿi Materiality Beyond Karbala: Religion That Matters (2024), Religious Education in a Global-Local World (Springer, 2016), and Muslims in Ireland: Past and Present (Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Notable articles include 'Embodied Virtual Reality: Redistributing Narrative Power in Contexts of War and Displacement' (International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2026), 'Making Fatima’s Presence Visible: Embodied Practices, Shiʿi Aesthetics and Socio-Religious Transformations in Iran' (Material Religion, 2023), and 'Displacement, humanitarian interventions and gender rights in the Middle East: Syrian refugees in Jordan as a case study' (Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2021). She has received funding from the British Academy and other national funders. Her contributions advance theoretical conceptualizations of women’s empowerment, ritual practices, materialities, and biopolitics of genetic counselling and family formations across religious traditions.