IAS Book Launch: Sonic Relations

We are welcoming Stefan Williamson Fa to present his monograph Sonic Relations. Devotion and Community in Turkey's Eastern Borderlands.

ABOUT THE BOOK
Sonic Relations examines how sound shapes religious and communal life among Shi‘i Muslims living in Turkey’s eastern borderlands, foregrounding the powerful role of vocal poetic recitation in cultivating connections not only among humans but also with the unseen.

Attending to a range of sonic forms and events - such as the call to prayer, public processions, the recitation of praise poetry and lamentations in ritual gatherings, and the production, circulation, and reception of audiovisual recordings - Sonic Relations advances a relational perspective on Islam that foregrounds horizontal relations with co-religionists and wider publics alongside vertical relations with more-than-human figures. Grounded in detailed ethnographic research conducted in Turkey and tracing transnational connections with Iran, the Caucasus, and Western Europe, the book situates the formation of religious community within Turkey’s shifting social, religious, and political landscape.

Through vivid ethnographic vignettes, sustained analysis, and audiovisual examples, Sonic Relations offers an intimate account of how Shi‘i Muslims creatively forge bonds of love, faith, and community within Turkey and across borders. It invites readers to reconsider religion not as belief alone, but as a sensory, relational, and deeply embodied practice.

Sonic Relations. Devotion and Community in Turkey's Eastern Borderlands was published by Indiana University Press in May 2026.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stefan Williamson Fa is a social-cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on Islam through auditory and culinary cultures. He completed his PhD at University College London in 2019. His first major project explored the role of sound in Shiʿi Islam among Azeri-Turkish speakers in Turkey, the Caucasus, and Iran. As a research associate at the University of Cambridge, his current work centres on Muslim foodways in the UK, with a focus on food provisioning and food-aid initiatives and their intersections with Islamic ethics and traditions of care.

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ABOUT THE EVENT
The event will open with a short presentation by the author Stefan Williamson Fa followed by responses from three scholars who will engage the book from different angles: Martin Stokes (Professor of Music, King’s College London), Sertaç Sehlikoglu (Associate Professor in Global Prosperity, UCL), and Ashraf Hoque (Associate Professor of Social Anthropology, UCL). The discussion will be chaired by Aeron O’Connor (Lecturer in Social Anthropology & Humanitarianism, UCL).