KD Thompson
UW–Madison open-topic Resident Fellow (2025-2026)
Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities, Religious Studies Program, UW–Madison
Adjacent Authority: Gender, Pluralism, and the Politics of Voice in East African Islamic Radio
In Tanga, Tanzania, women broadcast daily on Radio Nuur, a Swahili-language Islamic station committed to airing voices across denominational lines. This seems unremarkable—until you learn that many Tanzanian Muslims believe a woman’s voice is ‘awrah: something that must be concealed, like the body itself. How do women claim religious authority in a space that questions their right to be heard? How does a station committed to Islamic unity hold together communities that disagree about many things, including who gets to speak? In this presentation, we’ll listen for the answers in the everyday labor of broadcasting.
KD Thompson is Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities in the Religious Studies Program at UW-Madison. Their ethnographic research focuses on language and gender in Muslim communities in East Africa and North America. They are the author of three previous monographs: Muslims on the Margins: Creating Queer Religious Community in North America (NYU Press, 2023), Popobawa: Tanzanian Talk, Global Misreadings (Indiana UP, 2017), and Zimbabwe’s Cinematic Arts: Language, Power, Identity (Indiana UP, 2012), as well as the co-editor of Gendered Lives in the Indian Ocean: Islam, Marriage, and Sexuality on the Swahili Coast (Ohio UP, 2015). Their recent work has also appeared in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, American Anthropologist, and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.
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