Furthering understanding of the Black Muslim college student experience

The challenge

Much emphasis has been on intersectional marginalization experienced by Black Muslim youth, and the challenges that Black Muslim college students face. It is important to understand these issues while also developing a stronger understanding of the factors and contributors to their well-being and success. 

This project addresses this need by expanding research into identifying and evaluating how Black Muslim college students find or create belonging and experience affirmation with an emphasis on worldmaking, which refers to the communities that students might create for themselves that is the opposite of dominant community or cultural spaces. It is designed to  further our understanding of how and where Black Muslim colleges sustain joy, strength, and resistance in the face of marginalization.

The approach

“Black Muslim Worldmaking: Race, Religion, and Gender in the Lives of Black Muslim College Students” is led by principal investigator  Keon McGuire, an assistant professor at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. It continues earlier exploratory research funded by two seed grants from MLFTC and the Institute for Social Science Research, or ISSR. Co-principal investigators include assistant professor Saskias Casanova of the University of California, Santa Cruz; and assistant professor Samiha Rahman of California State University, Long Beach. 

This project aims to provide insights into how Black Muslim college students engage in worldmaking, create aesthetics of resistance and sustain practices of community excellence in spite of interlocking systems of oppression. The project will explore:

1. What worldmaking practices Black Muslim undergraduate these students engage in to find or create humanizing spaces of affirmation and belonging.
2.  How do Black Muslim undergraduate students experience and respond to intersectional microaggressions targeting multiple stigmatized identities (e.g., race, religion, gender, immigrant status). 
3. How can we use our understanding of Black Muslim undergraduate students’ creation of humanizing, affirming spaces and their experiences of intersectional microaggressions to develop an intersectional microaggression-micro affirmation scale for Black Muslim undergrad students, or IMSBM.

The research involves recruiting Black Muslim undergraduate college students from colleges and universities in Arizona and California to contribute to different facets of the research through individual semi-structured interviews, photovoice exercises, focus groups, as well as surveys. It also involves developing a scale to measure the frequency of intersectional microaggressions and micro-affirmations that occur for Black Muslim undergrads. An exploratory factor analysis will be conducted to explore how underlying factors contribute to the ways students receive supportive, subtle acts of acknowledgment, inclusion, and validation from others.