Dr David Tittensor has joined the team as the Research Fellow to the UNESCO Chair, Cultural Diversity and Social Justice.
David’s research interests are Muslim movements, Turkish politics and society, religion and development, and the Middle East. He has written and presented widely on the Gülen Movement, and has since converted his dissertation into a book entitled The House of Service: The Gülen Movement and Islam’s Third Way (Oxford University Press, April, 2014). Upon completing this project he expanded his research agenda to explore the wider domain of religion and development, with a particular focus on Islam. An outgrowth of the broader focus has been an edited volume (with Prof. Matthew Clarke) entitled Islam and Development: Exploring the Invisible Aid Economy, which is due out in June 2014 with Ashgate.
David undertook his PhD at Monash University (2007-11) where he completed an ethnography of the Turkish Muslim transnational education movement known as the Gülen Movement. During the course of his studies he won the prestigious Endeavour Award for Turkey ($50,000), which enabled him to spend a year in Turkey between 2008 and 09. His dissertation explored the movement’s religious ideo-theology and its impact on the movement’s educational activities, and whether the movement should be characterised as a philanthropic/civil society organisation.
