Monika Lindbekk

Research areas

• Legal Cultures and Comparative Law
• Gender
• Decision-making in Courts

Current research

1. Adjudicating Islamic Family Law in Egypt: Continuity and Rupture. A post-doctoral research project focusing on adjudication of Muslim marriage and divorce law by Egyptian courts before and after the 2011 revolution. More generally, the research focuses on the intersection between law, religion, and gender in this field. The overall aim of the project is to contribute to the scholarly literature on law in context and in action, more specifically a growing literature on the implementation of shari‘a-derived family legislations in courts. Given that Muslim family law is ostensibly drawn from the stipulations of Islamic shari‘a, a further aim is to shed light on the intersection between law and Islamic normativity in this field of law, and how legal reasoning is shaped by a modern, positivistic conception of law. At the core of this study was an analysis of judicial practice at five Cairenese family courts. With a view to investigate how Cairenes family courts integrate various social classes into what they regard as the essence of Islam, she draws material from five family courts in different neighbourhoods in Cairo during the period 2011-2015. The project addresses how judges articulate notions of gender relations in relation to contraction of marriage and divorce.

In addition to the post-doctoral research project (above), Monika Lindbekk is involved in the following running projects:

1. Gender and Judging. Co-organizer of an international research Collaboration dealing with Gender and Judging under the Law and Society Association together with Ulrike Schultz, Rania Maktabi, and Josephine Dawuni.
2. Uses of the past. Contributing to a HERA-project called "Understanding Shari'a: Past Perfect, Present Imperfect. HERA – Humanities in the European Research Area - is a partnership between 24 Humanities Research Councils across Europe and the European Commission. The main idea there is to see how "the past" (historical, textual references etc.) is being used in contemporary shari’a discourse and practices. The project is a collaboration of four institutions: Universities of Exeter, Leiden, Gottingen and Bergen with Gottingen focusing on discourse and practices regarding gender.
3. In 2016: How it felt to live in the Arab World five years after the ‘Arab Spring’. Contributing to "In 2016", which will provide an ‘encyclopedia of 2016’ that enables users, in a snapshot portrait of one year, to ‘jump right into’ and move around (via cross-references) in post-revolutionary Arab realities. Learn more at Olso University.