Gender and sexuality, queer anthropology, secularity and nonreligion, aesthetics of religion, ethics, time

South Asia (India), Europe

Stefan Binder is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK), University of Zurich. He studies the ethical and epistemological dimensions of current changes in sex/gender/sexuality systems in South Asia and Europe. Drawing on the anthropology of time, his project seeks to understand how contested politics of “newness,” “arrival,” or “generational change” impact the everyday lives of queer and trans* people in different contexts and at complex intersections of inequality and privilege. Before joining ISEK, he was part of the DFG priority program “Ästhetische Eigenzeiten” at University of Göttingen (CeMIS), where he worked on a postdoctoral project on the aesthetic production and manipulation of multiple temporalities in the context of Shi'i mourning rituals and media practices. He has published extensively on secularity, atheism, and religious pluralism, where he focuses on the sensorial, material, and aesthetic dimensions of lived religion and nonreligion. Stefan Binder received his PhD from Utrecht University for an ethnographic study on atheist activism in Telugu-speaking South India, which develops an aesthetic and postcolonial approach to the contested politics of the religious-secular binary. He studied Religious Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and Indology at University of Munich (LMU) and Leiden University.

Publications