This presentation was given during Coptic Solidarity’s 13th Annual Conference, “Uprooted & Endangered: Defending the Religious Minorities of the Middle East” in the Cannon Caucus Room, Washington, D.C., June 12, 2025.
Speaker: Candace Lukasik, Ph.D – Assistant Professor of Religion and Faculty Affiliate in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University; Currently a Faculty Leave Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University
In this presentation, Candace Lukasik discussed her book Martyrs and Migrants, which explores how Coptic Orthodox Christians navigate violence, migration, and transnational recognition following the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research in Egypt and the United States, she traces how Copts frame their suffering in religious and political terms—sometimes as persecuted minorities deserving asylum, other times as subjects of racialized suspicion under U.S. counterterrorism. The talk underscored how Coptic identity is shaped across borders, complicated by diaspora discourses of Christian persecution, American religious freedom, and shared but unequal life with Muslims in Egypt. Lukasik highlighted how local experiences of discrimination, class inequality, and sectarian violence intersect with global power structures, including U.S. foreign policy and international religious freedom campaigns. Through a rich ethnographic vignette from the village of Bahjūra in Upper Egypt, she showed how everyday Muslim-Christian relations oscillate between intimacy and conflict, and how migration reshapes those relations in ways that can harden sectarian perceptions. Rather than treating Coptic migrants as victims or agents alone, the book reveals how they are formed within—and respond to—transnational regimes of violence, recognition, and hope.”
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