Re-membering Cosmology: Muslim Students Holding onto Continuity within the Ruptures of Modernity

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 4:20 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 4
  In Roundtable Session: Re-membering Pedagogy: Mourning, Grieving and Healing as Part of Renewal (Table 1)

Abstract

Purpose
This paper draws on research with young second-generation Muslim immigrant college students to explore the challenges of navigating Western ontologies and epistemologies and their misalignments with an Islamic cosmology and, subsequently, Muslim ontologies, epistemologies, and material realities. It examines the ways in which Muslim students re-member their Islamic cosmologies in a U.S. society that is structured for and privileges Western, modernist ontologies.

Theoretical Framework
I draw on Hall (1990) to describe diaspora identity as a response to the continuities and similarities of historical and geographic belonging. Identity under this interpretation is constructed through the collective narratives that shape a community's oneness and continuity based on the shared histories, experiences, and points of reference that paradoxically underlie the changes of circumstances that have also been points of disruption and rupture in those narratives. Thus, identity is shaped by the intersubjectivities and shared realities from a community's historicized experiences with colonization, imperialism, and forced displacement.

Method and Data Sources
Data for this paper includes qualitative interviews, fieldnotes, and researcher reflections conducted with second-generation Muslim university students. I draw on Post-Intentional Phenomenology (PIP) (Vagle, 2018) from data collection through analysis as “thinking with theory” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2022). The researcher in PIP invites their assumptions and experiences in the phenomenon under investigation and sets up their data, theoretical concepts, and researcher reflexivity in a triangular three-way dialogue. PIP allowed me to break out of the constraints of rigid methodologies, explore identity at the cosmological level, and bring my whole being to my research.

Findings
The paper shows the ways in which second-generation, young Muslims negotiate the contradictions that arise when non-Western cosmological orientations encounter Western ontologies in U.S. society. Participants subverted and reconfigured U.S. American identity regimes to produce identities that aligned with their transnational Muslim ontologies and histories. Although Muslim students grew up in the West, their identities were oriented toward Muslim cosmologies, and thus neoliberal, national, and multiculturalist identities were secondary to Muslim identity.

Significance
This study suggests that understanding and critiquing modernity is an entry point to navigating Western theoretical frameworks, decolonizing methods, and imagining a cosmological orientation to research. It significantly contributes to an understanding of the ways in which scholars and educators from spiritual and faith-based communities explore the ruptures in their narratives as they work with their communities to reimagine continuity and agency in their lives.

Author

• Ashraf Laith Mohammad, University of Minnesota