Faith, Identity, and the Complexity of Belonging: Beyond Single Stories
When we talk about faith in educational spaces, I feel like it is often treated as a discrete box to tick on a diversity checklist, almost taboo, again something that should be acknowledged through proxies such as dietary practices. But the resources I’ve engaged with this week reveal something far more complex. In the same way that Appia in the Ted talk argues how the box religion is often attributed is a way more fluid container, one that accommodates drastically different ways of understanding and enacting religion..
Dr Haifaa Jawad’s work on Muslim women in sport demonstrates that for visibly Muslim women, those wearing hijab, faith becomes racialized and gendered. Their religious identity is not just a personal belief; it’s read onto their bodies in ways that white Christian practitioners never experience. The veil becomes a site of assumed oppression, assumed irrationality, assumed lack of agency. This is what Rekis calls “epistemic injustice” the dismissal of someone’s credibility based not on what they say, but on the intersecting identities through which they’re perceived.
It also intersects with gender and how gender is perceived. We can imagine that a muslim man in religious dress may face racial prejudice, but he doesn’t face the additional burden of having his autonomy questioned through gendered assumptions about religious modesty.
Rekis’s article was really useful in understanding this epistemic injustice: in secular academic spaces, religion as noted above can be perceived as a taboo subject often suppressed or disbelieved but importantly this injustice is also unequally distributed through affordances within intersectionality.
Implications for Our Teaching
What does this mean in arts higher education? The workshops have highlighted that UAL’s anti-racism work and EDI data reveal persistent attainment gaps correlated with students’ identities. When we consider faith as part of this matrix, several questions emerge:
- How are we creating space for different religions
- When we discuss representation, identity, and cultural heritage in our teaching, do we question our biases enough and allow religions space?
I think one of the central questions these readings brought up in me is how from our position of educators do we ensure spaces that are conducive to learning and simultaneously respectful of different worldviews? Can the learning space become a space in which these worldviews, if ever clashing, gently become a space to de-tangle these and work through them?
A privilege
I guess we could see our position as educators and it, in fact, is a position of privilege. We could frame that privilege as being the stewards of creating a space in which we can start to see faith as a lived experience shaped by everything else, rather than a label to recognise. Recognising that these students whose faith intersects with other identities hold unique knowledge and perspective that will enrich our collective understanding and therefore the learning that this privilege of being part of the classroom represents
Leave a Reply