Sultan Doughan

The Elie Wiesel Center welcomed Sultan Doughan as a post-doctoral fellow in September 2018. She was trained as an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley and is currently revising her dissertation thesis Teaching Tolerance: Citizenship, Religious Difference, and Race in Germany for final submission in December 2018. Located at the intersection of religious difference and racial relations within secularism, Doughan’s work inquires what citizenship can be for religiously differentiated minorities in a secular nation-state, especially after genocide. Her work draws on ethnographic research in the field of civic education in Berlin geared towards immigrant communities, particularly youth, considered to be religiously intolerant. Her research traces how secular governance establishes the category of the German Muslim, defined and established in relation to the Holocaust as an exceptional event and the figure of the Jew. At this conjuncture, she is rethinking the popularly circulating categories of tolerant versus religious by examining how certain Protestant notions are reorganized within state institutions and permeate civil society. Doughan focuses primarily on how civic educators of Middle Eastern descent, mostly descendants of Turkish guest worker and Palestinian refugees, inhabit the slot of the tolerant citizen and how they drive the field of civic education as extensions of a Protestant-shaped state power. She has taught courses on the ‘History and Theory of Anthropology’ at UC Berkeley and co-taught courses on ‘Religion and Race in Secularism’ as well as ‘Migration and Religion in Europe’ at Freie Universität Berlin. Doughan is also affiliated with the Department of Anthropology at Boston University.