Rate My Professor Yafa Shanneik

Professor Yafa Shanneik is Professor of Islam and Society in the Department of Religions, School of History, Religions and Philosophies at SOAS University of London. She holds a BA, MA, and PhD. Previously, she was Lecturer in Islamic Studies in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham. Shanneik's research pushes the boundaries of how Islam, gender, and migration are studied and understood in the 21st century. Her work examines intersections of religion, female agency, and mobility across Europe and the Middle East, with a focus on creative and transnational forms of resistance developed by Muslim women. She has conducted extensive multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork among Muslim women in the Levant, Arab Gulf countries, Iran, and various European countries. A distinctive feature of her scholarship is the integration of immersive and arts-based methodologies, including body-mapping, augmented reality, and virtual reality, to co-produce knowledge with displaced communities and foreground lived experiences of displacement, agency, and resistance.

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.