Z. Fareen Parvez

Z. Fareen Parvez is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her work examines how poor and subaltern communities carve out spaces of autonomy from the state in various domains such as health, moral and spiritual education, and economic survival. She has conducted participant observation in France, India, and Morocco. In Morocco, Parvez is exploring the relationship between different conceptions of science and religion in the city of Fez through a study of jinn possession. Her research looks at the debates around this phenomenon, the subjective experiences of patients, and the various ways they seek healing at the nexus of medicine and religion.

Parvez is the author of the award-winning book Politicizing Islam: the Islamic Revival in France and India (Oxford University Press, 2017). This book drew on two years of participant observation among marginalized Muslim communities in France and India. It presented how different varieties of secularism influence political action, mobilization, and in some cases withdrawal from the state and public sphere among poor and racialized Muslims living under the War of Terror and rise of nationalist politics. Drawing on this research, Parvez has published a number of public sociology essays in various outlets including The Guardian, Salon, Newsweek, and the LA Times.

Parvez has also completed research on a project focused on the complex ecology of household debt among low-income urban Muslims in India. This research was profiled in the Times of India.

She has received fellowships from the Social Science Research Council’s New Directions in the Study of Prayer, the American Institute of India Studies, and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. In 2019-2020, Parvez was a residential fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton.