"Muslim American Women on Campus" book discussion with Shabana Mir

Wednesday, December 3, 2014 3:00 PM EST
Johnson Center, Meeting Room F, 3rd Floor

Shabana Mir's powerful ethnographic study of women on Washington, D.C., college campuses reveals that being a young female Muslim in post-9/11 America means experiencing double scrutiny—scrutiny from the Muslim community as well as from the dominant non-Muslim community. Muslim American Women on Campus illuminates the processes by which a group of ethnically diverse American college women, all identifying as Muslim and all raised in the United States, construct their identities during one of the most formative times in their lives.

Mir, an anthropologist of education, focuses on key leisure practices--drinking, dating, and fashion--to probe how Muslim American students adapt to campus life and build social networks that are seamlessly American, Muslim, and youthful. In this lively and highly accessible book, we hear the women's own often poignant voices as they articulate how they find spaces within campus culture as well as their Muslim student communities to grow and assert themselves as individuals, women, and Americans. Mir concludes, however, that institutions of higher learning continue to have much to learn about fostering religious diversity on campus.

Shabana Mir is the author of Muslim American Women on Campus: Undergraduate Social Life and Identity, published by the University of North Carolina Press. The book has received the Outstanding Book Award for 2014 from the National Association for Ethnic Studies. Shabana has lived, studied, and taught in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Pakistan. She has taught Anthropology, Education, Research Methods, and Literature at Millikin University, Oklahoma State University, Indiana University, Eastern Illinois University, and the International Islamic University (Pakistan). She has a PhD in Education Policy Studies from Indiana University, an MPhil from Cambridge University, and an MA from Punjab University (Pakistan). She received the Outstanding Dissertation Award for her doctoral dissertation from the American Anthropological Association’s Council on Anthropology and Education. She conducted ethnographic fieldwork at Georgetown and George Washington Universities, as Visiting Researcher at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University. She is also involved in the development of Pakistani higher education, via faculty development, research methods training, research mentoring, and lectures on provocative issues related to religion and the state.

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