Subjective morality. Empirical studies on how people balance their own interests with the interests of others and experience moral meaning

This dissertation involves three projects investigating moral decision making. Project one investigates across two experiments how social recognition of moral and non-moral behavior influences subsequent moral striving. Project two investigates across two experiments how different perspectives people take on their past moral and non-moral behavior influence their subsequent moral striving. Project three investigates the influence of weight metaphors in moral judgments across three experiments. Furthermore, limitations and theoretical as well as applied implications of all three projects are discussed

Muslims in Indian cities:Degrees of segregation and the elusive ghetto

In India, the country with the third largest Muslim population in the world, residential segregation along religious lines has long been of concern. Many go so far as to speak of the large-scale ‘ghettoization’ of Muslims, a trend commonly attributed to the state’s negligence towards this religious minority and prolonged histories of so-called ‘communal violence’ between religious groups. Others emphasize longstanding pattern of voluntary residential clustering in enclaves. Both the ghetto and the enclave are usually considered highly segregated spaces, though one forced, one voluntary. This paper complicates such views through an in-depth engagement with the seminal ethnographic volume Muslims in Indian Cities, edited by Laurent Gayer and Christophe Jaffrelot. Based on novel quantitative estimates of religious demography, I contrast and compare the same eleven cities studied in their book Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Aligarh, Bhopal, Hyderabad, Delhi, Cuttack, Kozhikode and Bangalore using statistical indices of segregation. This comparison with the ethnographic ‘gold standard’ shows that the mere extent of segregation is an insufficient shortcut to the phenomenon of ghettoization: a ghetto actually need not be highly segregated. Consequently, I argue that one should not only distinguish between voluntary and forced clustering a distinction that is increasingly being made in the literature but also consider the wider ‘mental maps’ through which inhabitants experience, perceive and judge their city a broader complication that has not yet become common practice. Such mental maps specifically help to uncover historical trajectories, feelings of insecurity and the future expectations of people regarding their cities

Being Muslim and working for peace: Group identification, religious beliefsets and political behaviour in Gujarat

While social scientists ingreasingly share the assumption that religion can generally escalate as much as de-escalate conflict, the reconstruction of this ambivalence on the micro-level of religious identity and social action is still in its infancy. This empirical case study led to the identification of four ideal-typical ways in which religious beliefs, group identification processes and political behaviour can interact among Muslim peace activists in Gujarat, India. „Faith-based actors“ and „secular leaders“ represent static and clear configurations, while „emancipating women“ and „doubting professionals“ provide first hints to differentiate the hypothesis of ambivalence

Effects of food-borne nanomaterials on gastrointestinal tissues and microbiota

Ingestion of engineered nanomaterials is inevitable due to their addition to food and prevalence in food packaging and domestic products such as toothpaste and sun cream. In the absence of robust dosimetry and particokinetic data, it is currently challenging to accurately assess the potential toxicity of food-borne nanomaterials. Herein, we review current understanding of gastrointestinal uptake mechanisms, consider some data on the potential for toxicity of the most commonly encountered classes of food-borne nanomaterials (including TiO2 , SiO2 , ZnO, and Ag nanoparticles), and discuss the potential impact of the luminal environment on nanoparticle properties and toxicity. Much of our current understanding of gastrointestinal nanotoxicology is derived from increasingly sophisticated epithelial models that augment in vivo studies. In addition to considering the direct effects of food-borne nanomaterials on gastrointestinal tissues, including the potential role of chronic nanoparticle exposure in development of inflammatory diseases, we also discuss the potential for food-borne nanomaterials to disturb the normal balance of microbiota within the gastrointestinal tract. The latter possibility warrants close attention given the increasing awareness of the critical role of microbiota in human health and the known impact of some food-borne nanomaterials on bacterial viability. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.</p

Totalitarian law and communal ghettoisation: an Arendtian perspective

How are legal institutions and frameworks exploited to create ghettoised communities in contemporary India? Across three case studies – the Disturbed Areas Act in Gujarat, the ‘bulldozer justice’ phenomenon of 2022, and the BJP's electoral ‘land jihad’ rhetoric – we argue that law, far from being a liberal bulwark against majoritarianism, increasingly comes to encapsulate raw power, unencumbered by either morality or fact. We theorise this phenomenon through Hannah Arendt's argument that the seeds of totalitarianism lie in the hollowing-out, depoliticising effect of ‘juridification’, paving the way for totalitarianism to fill the affective void. But what happens to law once the threshold to totalitarianism is crossed? In contemporary India, we argue, the depoliticising, technocratic kind of law that Arendt described is not the only legal pathology; we also witness the emergence of a novel kind of hyper-politicised, performative, signalling, ultimate meaningless law that she didn’t quite anticipate. It is the dialectic between these two legal pathologies – juridification as bureaucratisation and hyper-politicised signalling – that cements Muslim Indians’ increasingly precarious ghettoisation

Rifah-e Aam Club, Lucknow: Public sphere and public space in urban India

Public space comes under threat, is contested as much as shared, an arena for power and hegemony, leaving little hope for interaction across social divides. At the same time, each reincarnation of our fragmented public sphere necessarily builds on historical precedent, inadvertently inscribing public space with fresh hope as it expands the scope of the term’s original promise. Over time, this process creates iconic infrastructure such as the Rifah-e Aam Club, the “Club for the public good” in Lucknow, North India. From the initial stirrings of associational culture under British colonialism through key moments of the national movement down to today’s goonda raj, or rule of thugs, this unruly space came to host the most unlikely republic of letters, reuniting a public across time and space that often seems irredeemably fragmented. It is when buildings like this acquire a life of their own that cities realise their creative promise

Muslim politics in North India

Susewind R. Muslim politics in North India. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2015

"Opfer" und "Aktivistin". Zwei Muslima aus Gujarat ringen mit der Ambivalenz des Sakralen

Recourse to religion can escalate as well as de-escalate intergroup conflict – so the emerging academic consensus. But the “ambivalence of the sacred Appleby 2000) concerns not only violent or non-violent movements or ideologies, it is also experienced on the micro-level of religious identities and individual agency. This article takes two female Muslim peace activists’ biographical narratives and psychometric profiles to illustrate how the ambivalence and ambiguity of religion towards violent conflict unfolds its dynamics on the individual level. Both women struggle with and fight for religion in Gujarat, India – and both experience their own Muslimness as ambivalent and/or ambiguous. Their stories highlight the relevance of explorative empirical methods on the individual microlevel for an adequate understanding of religio-political conflict