Abstract
This article focuses on The Hijab Project, a collective art exhibit that was created by a Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) collective to address assumptions about Muslim women and girls who veil. The art project used data from a survey collect at Mount Top High, a suburban public high school in Utah, to inform the need for a public intervention that addressed issues of Islamophobia during a time of contentious political climate in the United States. Using transnational feminism to think about concepts of agency and piety, the article contends that, despite traditional framing of Muslim women as passive victims, through their artwork, the girls in this research group prove that religiosity and choice are not dichotomous. Lastly, this piece argues that The Hijab Project represents a successful example of critical community-engaged scholarship by demonstrating that partnerships between community members and universities can be a force for civic engagement and social change.
Highlights
Tabarek, the author of the epigraph that opens this article, was one of the founding members of the research collective Al Ahad;1 her writing was prominently displayed below her artistic interpretation of her relationship with the hijab
The piece (Figure 1) along with eight others were displayed at The Hijab Project, a collective exhibition that used textile art to interrogate Western understandings of the Muslim veil and the women and girls that wear them at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA)
The Hijab Project was the culmination of a 9-month Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) project conducted at Mount Top High2 a primarily Caucasian school in the suburbs of Salt Lake City (Utah) during the 2016–2017 academic year, which sought to understand how Islamophobia was materialized in the everyday experiences of Muslims girls in a public high school
Summary
The author of the epigraph that opens this article, was one of the founding members of the research collective Al Ahad; her writing was prominently displayed below her artistic interpretation of her relationship with the hijab. Scholars in the field of ethnic studies argue that certain concepts, such as race and ethnicity, are most often understood as static and are connected to specific ideas, such as biology and country of origin (Gans 2017; Kubota and Lin 2006; Omi and Winant 2014) These scholars recognize that, in everyday lived experiences, the ways racial and ethnic belonging are perceived by society and how this perception affects the lives of individuals varies through time. After presenting a brief overview of how the veil has been perceived in the West, I use survey data to demonstrate how these understandings are present at Mount Top High
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