Zenia has a PhD from the University of Copenhagen on contentious politics among Arab media users in Europe. Her dissertation focused on the role of the media in political activism among Syrian diaspora groups in Denmark, Sweden, and Germany. She holds an MA in Middle Eastern Studies with Arabic from the University of Copenhagen and a BA in Arab and Islamic Studies from Aarhus University. She studied at Lund University's media department and was a visiting scholar at the Freie Universität in Berlin. She is a member of the editorial board of the Scandinavian Journal of Islamic Studies. She has been teaching the MA course Media in the Middle East at the University of Copenhagen and has published several articles on diasporic media practices and the uprising in Syria. Zenia’s research interests revolve around the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as media and migration. She is interested in how media representations, among other factors, form identity processes and feelings of belonging. She is also concerned with research methods and methodological reflections, especially in relation to conducting fieldwork.
Sara Jul Jacobsen has great experience conducting fieldwork within religious milieus in Europe, particularly in Denmark. Her research interests are gender, religion, and research methods. She has participated in international and national conferences on gender and religion as a key speaker or as a panellist. She also worked on and published on counter-radicalisation issues, focusing on gender, religion, and policy.
Mark Sedgwick has a PhD in the history of Islam from the University of Bergen and is professor of Arab and Islamic Studies in the Department of the Study of Religion at Aarhus University. He previously taught for many years at the American University in Cairo. He works on a variety of topics including Islamic modernism, terrorism, and Salafism, and on Muslims in the West; he also works on the ideology of the Western Far Right and on theoretical issues. His Traditionalism: The Radical Project to Restore Sacred Order (London: Pelican; New York: Oxford University Press) is due out in June 2023.