The “Exotic Other”: A Poetic Autoethnography of Two Muslim Teachers in Higher Education

Abstract

Considering the current political climate and the terrorist attacks associated with few Muslims around the world, being Muslim females in the United States is challenging. While our religious identity is visible by our Islamic attire, we found ourselves in the frontlines fighting against hatred, stereotypes, bigotry, and racism toward Muslims. In this article, we present our experiences of living a non-White existence when teaching at a White institution in higher education in the United States. Adding to the existing body of research about Muslims in the United States, the study aims at shedding the lights on this experience of Muslim female academics to raise awareness about such struggle and to promote more inclusive environment for Muslims in educational sphere. To voice these experiences, we utilized poetry as a research method by selecting poems from our poetic autoethnography. The analysis of the poems revealed three major themes: (a) Conceptualizing Agency, (b) The Muslim Ban, and (c) Challenging Diversity. In addition, the findings of the study suggest that poetry can be healing and empowering.