My research interests lie at the intersection of anthropology of ethics, anthropology of religion, anthropology of the contemporary, and anthropology of media. My doctoral research explores how ideas about being moral and the understanding of piety and pious practice influence a group of young Turkish-American Muslim women’s sociality and their engagement with each other and with Facebook. I specifically examine the moral ambivalence surrounding Facebook use and moral selfhood and how these in turn facilitates new experiences of piety and moral subjectivity among these women. My discussion of everyday morality and piety contributes to the fields of anthropology of ethics and anthropology of Islam by showing the interconnectedness of spontaneity and conventionality and ethical and social spheres in addition to suggesting the interdependency of ethical (ethical) and themitical(moral) autopoiesis. Furthermore, my exploration of the ways in which understandings of piety and pious practice can take place in an online platform, Facebook, and understanding of the ways that new practices of mediation become part of existing and old moral debates, extends the scholarship on social media through including the pious construction of self in the analysis of these online platforms.
