Exploring the Educational Experiences of Muslim Girls: tales told to tourists — should the white researcher stay at home?

Abstract

AbstractThe title for this paper is partly taken from a book chapter by Anne Seller (1994), ‘Should the feminist philosopher stay at home?’ I use it because it encapsulates the ethical issues that arose for me as I did my research on the educational experiences of Muslim girls in a private Muslim girls’ school and a single‐sex state school with a high percentage of Muslim students. The paper considers the methodological and ethical issues involved in doing a piece of cross‐cultural research. It is a personal exploration of how I, as a white, non‐Muslim and not formally religious person, worked with two different Muslim communities. It argues for a feminist and post‐structural approach to the research process so that the subjectivity of the researcher is explicitly placed in any piece of research and the limitations of the research are then openly acknowledged. It further argues that using the Foucauldian notion of discourse as an analytical tool, allows for an explanation for the discursive framework in which the researcher operates but does not suggest that this is ‘set in stone’. On the contrary, through a personal and critical engagement with the discursive positionings of the researcher (and those of others), an exploration is possible which means that perhaps these limitations can be negotiated and even transcended. It further argues that, although the ‘stories’ I listened to and analysed are inevitably ‘coloured’ by both my own positionings and resultant interactions with the positionings of the participants, this can add to, and place another perspective on those told to other researchers in the area who differ in age, ethnic background, religious faith, class, sexuality etc. Such different perspectives can then be put into the theoretical ‘melting pot’ so that they can be critically examined, reworked and reinterpreted and in this way add to debate in the area.