CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Nikolova, Madlen Ivanova |
|---|---|
| Title | Islam on Trial: Normalisation of Islam in Bulgaria and the role of intellectuals |
| Summary | The purpose of the thesis is to analyse the symbolic violence intellectuals exert in constructing politically effective representations of Islam in Bulgaria. This is done through the close investigation of expert witnesses’ discourse in a recent trial against thirteen Muslims from Bulgaria, who were accused and convicted of propagating a “foreign” and “politic al-ideological& #x201d; Islam against the “democratic-liberal order.” The expert witnesses opposed this “political” and “foreign” Islam to “traditional” and “everyday” Islam. I argue that this discursive strategy could be read as normalisation in Foucauldian terms. In contrast to Foucault’s understanding of normalisation and the role of psychiatric expertise within the juridical field, what is normalised in the case of the trial I studied are not individual pathologies, but forms of (“everyday”) Islam that are compatible with the current post-political liberal regime. I also consider intellectuals’ conflicting relationships to the trial by taking into account their positioning within the field of power. |
| Supervisor | Kowalski, Alexandra; Fabiani, Jean-Louis |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/nikolova_madlen.pdf |
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