Muslim Women Managing Women's Shelters : Somaya, the Muslimwoman and Religion as Resource

This article focuses on Sisters’ Shelter Somaya in Sweden, an organization unique in its claim to be a women’s shelter by and for Muslim women, and in its combining of Islamic and secular feminisms. Examining the organization’s self-presentations, the author argues that there is, however, an ongoing shift from an emphasis on its Muslim profile to a dissolution of the very same. Looking into potential loss in the process (for clients, activists, allies, and feminism at large), the analysis draws on current research on anti-Muslim intolerance and normative secularism. The concept of the “Muslim woman” is employed to illustrate the stereotyping that continuously associates Muslim women with “victims” inhabiting shelters rather than capable “managers”. Intersectionality is pointed at as an emic strategy adopted by Somaya to overcome division, but also critically analysed as a consensus-creating signifier that hinders diversity. Thus,the article raises the increasingly important issue of the relationship between religion, gender, and feminism in the post-secular turn, and the author calls for critical self-reflection and creative affirmation in the interaction with heterogeneous others.

Depression in the aftermath of eviction : A one-year follow-up study of a disruptive housing life event

Eviction from housing is an institutionalized social process affecting millions in the western world, but very little is understood about its impact on people’s lives. Guided by George Brown and Tirril Harris’s landmark sociological research on disruptive life events, together with evidence that home is an important ‘place’, this study aims to contribute to an understanding of eviction’s fallout by considering depression as a potential outcome. Taking advantage of unique data on all evictions in Sweden and linking to longitudinal registers, this study seeks to determine whether working-age adults facing imminent eviction in 2009 had a greater risk of depression in the following year compared, using penalized maximum likelihood logistic regressions, to a control group randomly drawn from the Swedish population. Results indicate that imminent eviction is significantly associated with subsequent depression, even accounting for a range of social, economic, geographic and behavioral characteristics. Contrary to expectations, the findings are not robust for gender differences. Recent mental illness is the only control variable significantly moderating the association of interest, which remains significant regardless of illness history. The results provide grounds for treating eviction as a disruptive life event in its own right.