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The University of Winnipeg

Zabeen Khamisa

Zabeen Khamisa Title: Lecturer
Phone: 204-786-9415
Office: 4M40
Email: z.khamisa@uwinnipeg.ca

Biography:

Zabeen Khamisa is a lecturer in the Department of Religion and Culture at the University of Winnipeg. Zabeen is completing her doctoral degree in the joint Wilfrid Laurier University-University of Waterloo PhD program, Religious Diversity in North America, with a focus on lived experiences of Sikhs in Canada. Her dissertation is a digital ethnography that examines the rise of an elite constellation of millennial Sikh entrepreneurial activists and the innovative ways they express their shared Sikh values and moral positions for global social change via the social, economic, and political domains of Canadian society.   

Zabeen earned an Honours BA in Religion and Culture Studies from Wilfrid Laurier University in 2012.  She earned an MA in Religion and Culture Studies with a focus on religion and social change and Sikh activism in Canada from Wilfrid Laurier University in 2013. Zabeen was a Graduate Student Fellow at the Centre for the Studies of Religion and Society at the University of Victoria from 2017 to 2018. She is also an active member with the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion and the Canadian Anthropology Society and has presented a number of papers with various academic associations and conferences including the Dr. Jasbir Singh Saini Endowed Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies Conference and the Sikh Studies Unit at the American Academy of Religion. Zabeen has also worked in various capacities for non-profit organizations.

Teaching Areas:

Sikhism; South Asian Religions; Religion in Public Life

Courses:

  • Religions of India (REL-2703)
  • Religion and Society: Critique of Development (REL-2511)
  • Religion and Culture: The Multifaith Society (REL-2405)
  • Issues in the Study of Secular Society (REL-2406)
  • Sikhs in Canada (REL-3940/4940)

Research Interests:

Global Sikhism; Sikhs in North America (Canada and America); Religion, Value(s), and Social Change; Cultural Economics; Moral Economies and Social Issues; Identity and Representation; Digital Religion; Religious Millennials

Publications:

"Disruptive Garb: Gender Production and Millennial Sikh Fashion Enterprises in Canada" Religions 11, no. 4 (2020): 160. Accessible at https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11040160