Page 8 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

Acknowledgments

This volume is a collective endeavor in many respects. It is the result of a con-
ference we organized in December 2001 at the University of Amsterdam. We
would like to express our gratitude to the contributors to this volume as well as
to Dale Eickelman, Brian Larkin, Meg MacLagan, David Morgan, Rafael San-
chez, and Peter van der Veer, who also took part in the conference.
The idea for this conference was generated in the Pionier research program,
Modern Mass Media and the Imagination of Communities, that has been gen-
erously sponsored by the Netherlands Foundation of Scienti¤c Research (NWO),
and in the research program of the International Institute for the Study of Islam
in the Modern World (ISIM). We would like to thank the Amsterdam School
for Social Science Research (ASSR) and the ISIM for providing the ¤nancial and
logistic support without which this conference would not have been possible.
In developing this book project we have greatly bene¤ted from stimulating
conversations with colleagues and friends. Birgit Meyer wishes to express spe-
cial thanks to the Research Centre Religion and Society (University of Amster-
dam), the Pionier program, and others: Gerd Baumann, Marleen de Witte,
Peter Geschiere, Francio Guadeloupe, Charles Hirschkind, Lotte Hoek, Stephen
Hughes, Michael Lambek, Brian Larkin, Meg MacLagan, Martijn Oosterbaan,
Peter Pels, Rafael Sanchez, Patricia Spyer, Mattijs van de Port, Peter van Rooden,
Peter van der Veer, Oskar Verkaaik, and Jojada Verrips. Annelies Moors ex-
tends her thanks also to the participants in the ISIM research program (espe-
cially former fellow Saba Mahmood) and Ph.D. students working on related
themes (in particular, Miriyam Aouragh on Palestine in Cyberspace and Nahda
Shehada on debates about family law and court practices in Gaza), the Public
Discourse section of the Arab Families Working Group (especially Omnia el
Shakry with whom she coauthored a piece on media and the family in the
Middle East), and the Collaborative Program of the Social Science Research
Council on Reconceptualizing Public Spheres in the Middle East (especially
Rima Sabban, who writes about the mediated presence of migrant domestic
workers and who introduced her to the media world of Dubai).
We also want to mention our involvement with the KNAW-project on Indo-
nesian Mediations directed by Ben Arps and Patricia Spyer, and the Religion and
Media Program chaired by Faye Ginsburg and Angela Zito at New York Univer-
sity. We owe special thanks to Saar Slegers for the careful attention she paid to
the preparation of the manuscript and for her patience with us. At Indiana Uni-
versity Press we are grateful to Rebecca Tolen for her work on this project.