En-Chieh Chao (GRS '13)
En-Chieh Chao (BU PhD 2013) is a cultural anthropologist, currently Associate Professor of Sociology Department at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan. Her research interests focus on the intersections between religion, gender, race, and STS (social studies of science/technology). Her book Entangled Pieties: Muslim-Christian Relations and Gendered Socialities in Java, Indonesia was released from Palgrave Macmillan in August 2017. More recently, Chao undertakes a project to study Islam with science, technology and society in the Indo-Malay world. She explores the overlooked multi-species science of halal－the dynamics of Islamic ritual purity in modern life involving animal physiology, molecular biology, and chemistry－to expose the social contingencies that gave birth to certain scientific practices and religious understandings in the late 20th and 21st centuries. Her peer-reviewed articles (written either in English or Chinese) investigate issues including: the cultural history of inter-religious lives in Java; Islamophobia and cyber-racism in the US; young female hijab designers’ social influence in Indonesia ; and the relationship between global Islamic jurisprudence, animal welfare, the modern meat industry , as well as laboratory science.
Publications
- 2017. Entangled Pieties: Muslim-Christian relations and gendered sociality in Java, Indonesia. Palgrave Macmillan.
- 2018. “Beautifully Islam: The Rise of “Hijabers Community” and Affective Agency in Central Java. Taiwanese Journal of Sociology 64: 1-47.
- 2014. “The-Truth-About-Islam.Com: Ordinary Theories of Racism and Cyber Islamophobia,” Islamophobia and the racialization of Muslims in the West (Special Issue), Critical Sociology. 41(1): 57-75.
- 2011. “Blessed Fetishism: Language Ideology and Embodied Worship among Indonesian Pentecostals in Java,” Culture and Religion 12 (4): 373-399