Professor Valérie Amiraux

Professor Valérie Amiraux

Professor of Sociology, University of Montreal Professor Valérie Amiraux is on leave from her position as Senior Research Fellow at the CNRS and currently associate professor at the department of sociology of the University of Montreal where she holds the Canada Research Chair for the study of religious pluralism and ethnicity.

Since 1992, she has been working Muslims in Europe, first by looking at transnational mobilizations of Muslim organisations based in Germany and active in Turkey (Acteurs de l'islam entre Allemagne et Turquie. Parcours militants et expériences religieuses, Paris, L'Harmattan, coll. Logiques politiques, 2001), then, when she was a Jean Monnet fellow at the Robert Schuman for Advanced Studies of the European University Institute (Florence) on the State regulation of Muslim minorities in EU member-states and the religious discrimination experienced by Muslims (Politics of Visibilities. Young Muslims European Public Spaces, co-edited with Gerdien Jonker, Bielefeld, Transcript Verlag, 2005).

In that framework, she has developed an expertise on discrimination and in particular on headscarf issues. Since 2003, she is a senior expert for the EUMAP programme of the Open Society Institute and is the author of the 2011 Paris report on discrimination of Muslims in Paris-Goutte d’or (to be released next Fall).