The Mokha Majlis Method M3 : A MusCrit-Informed Collaborative Storytelling Gathering

• In Event: Beyond Extraction: Islamic Community Practices as Liberatory Research

Abstract

Objectives
The Mokha Majlis Method is designed to reclaim storytelling as both a decolonial and critical research practice within and beyond educational spaces. Rooted in Muslim Critical Theory (MusCrit) and Critical Race Methodology (Solórzano & Yosso), the purpose is to foster communal healing, resist epistemic erasure, and affirm agency among Muslim-identified youth through collaborative narrative-sharing in microaffirmative spaces—especially over coffee or tea. This approach directly confronts injustices of exclusion and misrepresentation by repositioning Muslim voices at the center of community research and transformation.
Theoretical Framework
Guided by MusCrit, intersectionality, and frameworks interrogating Islamophobia, the Mokha Majlis joins a lineage of methods such as Critical Narrative (Pino-Gavidia & Adu, 2022), Platicas, Sister Circles, Barbershop Talks, and Hakeya/Hakiwatia from Latinx, Black, and Arab traditions. This method recognizes majoritarian narratives in education as products of coloniality, while affirming that microaffirmative, culturally-rooted spaces.The traditional coffee house can serve as an affirming place where storytelling is used to convey and preserve knowledge, and resistance. Freire’s pedagogy of dialogic engagement is invoked: knowledge is co-constructed by community, for community.
Methods
The Mokha Majlis is both setting and methodology;gathering Muslims in informal, welcoming environments such as local Yemeni-American cafes, homes, and virtual spaces. Here, coffee and tea are central, echoing the historical journey and communal function of coffeehouses throughout the Muslim world. The method is intentionally dialogic, privileging storytelling, mutual aid, and collaborative reflection, with each participant positioned as a co-creator of knowledge rather than a research “subject.” Data are generated via organic conversation, with emphasis on reciprocity, affirmation, and collective meaning-making. Member-checking and reflective dialogue are foundational.
Data Sources
Stories of the experiences shared by Muslim collaborators gathered whether face-to-face or online as a virtual majlis become the data for analysis. Stories span microaffirmative moments, resistance to systemic islamophobia, and the everyday work of community building. These accounts may be complemented by participant observations, fieldnotes from gatherings, and material artifacts (like coffee cups, poetry, digital ephemera) that together document the ethos and praxis of the Mokha Majlis.
Mokha Majlis (M3) sessions are restorative spaces, affirming belonging, agency, and resilience among participants. Conversations have the potential to unearth not only challenges, intersectional stigma, exclusion, policy failures, and strategies of resistance, joy, and solidarity. The Majlis,M3 gathering, becomes a platform for authentic dialogue, organizational mobilization, and the reclaiming of Muslim-centered epistemologies that disrupt Western deficit models.
Significance
The story and symbolism of coffee, the coffeehouse or gatherings in homes; the Mokha Majlis Method challenges colonial research norms and affirms community-rooted ways of knowing. It not only documents microaffirmative spaces and collective healing but provides a replicable model for research as liberation, a tool for resisting, persisting, and enacting transformation rooted in everyday life. In doing so, it offers new pathways for decolonial futures in education research, centering voices long marginalized in academic discourses.

Author

• Carolyn M. Lane, California State University - Bakersfield