Arab American Feminism and the Legacy of Community Research

Congratulations on being named a Marguerite Casey Freedom Scholar during the FY25 academic year. What does this recognition mean to you personally? And what does this mean to you in terms of your professional accomplishments?

I was especially recognized for the impacts of my community-based research, especially with Arab American communities. I therefore accepted the award in honor of the many researchers and communities with whom I have been developing my scholarship. For example, in my book Arab America, I write about how my methodology entailed co-producing my analysis of “diasporic Arab feminism”  with various Arab American community activists in the San Francisco Bay Area.  In Cairo, Egypt, I worked with a coalition of feminist organizations to theorize mothering and caregiving as foundational practices shaping the Arab Spring revolutions.  In Chicago, I have been working with mothers of police violence survivors and community organizers to conceptualize “radical mothering” as a pedagogy and practice of prison abolition and the decolonization of indigenous land.  In this sense, I view the award as an affirmation of research methodologies that prioritize long-term community engagement, accountable relationships with research partners and participants, and the co-production of theory and analysis.

You also received the University Scholar Award during FY25. Please give us a short overview of your current research and how it ties into your larger academic commitments.

I have recently completed a co-authored book entitled, Radical Mothering: Caregiving and Resistance across Prison Walls (Forthcoming, Haymarket Press).  It is based on what I call social movement led research methodologies, co-produced and co-authored with Chicago’s Mothers of the Kidnapped (MOK), a group of mothers of mostly incarcerated Black and Latinx survivors of police frame-ups and torture, and Erica Bentley, a community organizer with the MAMAS Collective. Radical Mothering challenges the ways that the vital perspectives of mothers and caregivers are all too often ignored, dismissed, and/or sidelined in social movement and policy work. Based on the life stories of the MOK, our book shows that radical mothering, or the everyday lives of mothers of incarcerated people, fosters the emergence of invaluable political analysis and policy-based strategy.  Radical mothering for example fosters new knowledge about the structures of carceral violence such as medical negligence, financial exploitation, the hidden webs of power through which city- and state-level systems buttress authority and obscure systemic racial injustices, and the ripple effects of prison violence beyond prison walls into families and communities.  It also contributes new policy and activist practices such as reciprocal power-building, non-biological mothering, and collective care to efforts committed to bringing incarcerated people home and abolishing prisons.

You work at the intersection of Feminist Studies and Ethnic Studies, two dynamic and evolving fields. How would you describe the relationship between these disciplines, and how has your scholarship evolved with them?

Both of these fields were born out of the feminist, civil rights, and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s and have insisted on centering and amplifying histories and knowledge systems that have been erased by dominant Eurocentric academic fields and paradigms (i.e. those of women, queer, and trans people, indigenous people, immigrants, and people of color). At UIC, I have pursued feminist of color studies specifically through the Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS) and Ethnic Studies through Global Asian Studies (GLAS). To be sure, these fields overlap as gender and sexuality, central to Feminist Studies, have become increasingly central to Ethnic Studies. Likewise, racial justice and decolonization, key themes in Ethnic Studies, have become increasingly central to Feminist Studies. Both fields assume that interdisciplinary theories and methods are necessary for understanding the intertwined forms of power—like colonization, race, class, gender, sexuality—that influence the research questions scholars in these fields tend to investigate. Out of a commitment to disrupting extractive Eurocentric research practices, they insist on affirming community-based epistemologies such as the Indigenous Studies assumption that knowledge emerges out of relationships between people and land or the feminist of color insistence on lived knowledge production.

Finally, as part of their decolonial and anti-racist methods, both of these fields are committed to relinquishing the authority of the teacher or professor and prioritize interactive, collaborative learning that equips students with tools for challenging power, contributing to their communities, fostering a self-determined sense of identity and community, and engaging in inter-communal solidarity.

I drew on the theories and methods of these fields early on, when I worked with colleagues across the U.S. to build the field of Arab American Studies within Ethnic Studies and Feminist of Color Studies.  Before I came to UIC, at the University of Michigan, I co-founded one of the first Arab American Studies programs within Ethnic Studies and co-organized the first Critical Ethnic Studies Conference in the U.S.  Fields like Ethnic Studies and Feminist of Color Studies played a crucial role in opening up opportunities for challenging the erasure of research and curriculum about Arab Americans in higher education.  It has been gratifying to be part of the legacy of Arab American Studies specifically, which has centered the experiences and knowledges emerging out of Arab American communities in higher education and as a result, has conceptualized forms of racism that had been previously silenced in higher education, despite their long-lasting histories and impacts, including anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racism.

How do you typically like to integrate your research into your mentorship of students?

I am grateful to the Chancellor’s Undergraduate Research Initiative which has allowed me to integrate a group of undergraduate students into my research each year.  Over the past two years, my students have been working on my research with mothers of incarcerated people.  They have gained skills in community based research, including building mutual trust and interviewing as well as documenting and analyzing the ripple effects of prison injustices into local communities.  During the FY25 academic year, I had the chance to celebrate my student Rose Tharakan, pursuing the GWS minor, won the Capstone Innovation Award at UIC Honors College’s Fall 2024 Honors Research Symposium for the way she developed and presented the research she developed with me.  She conducted research on the Illinois Department of Corrections’ commissary items and costs on incarcerated people and their loved ones, analyzing the nutritional value within commissary items, its impact on those incarcerated, and the financial strain it puts on families.  It was incredibly rewarding to witness Rose integrate her interest in medicine/pharmacy with feminist of color research approaches focusing on personal stories and experiences.

I have also enjoyed mentoring students within the new Global Middle East Studies minor which I co-founded with a group of UIC colleagues–from training our graduate student assistant in curriculum development and programming to training undergraduates and graduate students in presenting research papers at an annual symposium.

Is there a project, initiative, or collaboration on the horizon that you’re excited about and would like to share with us?

By the end of this academic year, I hope to have submitted my co-authored book, Social Movement Led Research Methods for publication. This book contributes research methodologies that affirm the expansive forms of knowledge that are produced out of the everyday practices of social movements. It applies indigenous and feminist of color concepts of “lived knowledge production” to social movement spaces in order to explore them as crucial sites for critical theory-making and analysis about state violence and liberation. It is based on interviews with university professors who have committed most of their lives to social movement work beyond their academic pursuits alongside community organizers who have partnered with scholar-activists working within university settings. Social Movement-Led Research Methodology strives to decolonize dominant colonizing approaches to research about (or with) social movements and to university-movement or university-community partnerships.  Specifically, it highlights the kinds of methodologies–whether decolonial or abolitionist–useful for disrupting the “activism” vs. “academic” binary and why this matters to reclaiming the university as a site for nurturing liberation and alternative futures. In addition, readers will walk away with strategies for university based scholar-activists to build sustainable relationships with movements and communities; enact accountability and ethics in movement/community-partnerships; and ensure that their research contributes to social movement goals. This book is especially meant for scholar-activists committed to equipping themselves with viable liberatory methodologies in the face of intensified university repression, scrutiny, and gatekeeping and anyone committed to transparency and accountability in research practice.