Dr Lili di Puppo explores Muslim identities in prison environment

We welcome the return of Dr Lili di Puppo, a former visiting fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute in 2022. She has come back to the Institute to collaborate with gulagechoes bringing to the project her knowledge of Russian Muslim communities.

She will be exploring the relationship between Muslim identity and prison identity on the basis of interviews collected with (former) Muslim prisoners in Russia. Lili was was previously assistant professor of sociology at HSE University, Moscow.

Her research focuses on religion and ethnicity, the interconnection between memory, place and identity and environmental movements and spirituality in the Eurasian region. She has done fieldwork in Russia’s Volga-Ural region and Georgia. Her work has been published in Ethnicities, Globalizations, East European Politics, Contemporary Islam, the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures and Global Crime. She is co-editor of the book “Peripheral Methodologies: Unlearning, Not-Knowing and Ethnographic Limits” (Routledge, 2021).