Juxtaposing Sonare and Videre Midst Curricular Spaces: Negotiating Muslim, Female Identities in the Discursive Spaces of Schooling and Visual Media Cultures

• In Event: Roundtable Session 107
  In Roundtable Session: Curricula of Resistance Across the World

Abstract

Muslims have a starring role in the media’s curriculum on otherness. What is it like to be female and Muslim in this post-9/11 discursive context? Seven participants share stories of their high schooling experiences and sense of identity, and their readings of images highlight intersections of media discourses with lived experience. Auto/ethno/graphic narratives are juxtaposed with participant stories to decenter researcher authority and deconstruct processes of othering. This bricolage draws from cultural studies, postcolonial feminist theory, and post-reconceptualist curriculum theory. Issues raised include veiling obsession, Islamophobia, absences in the school curriculum, and mass media as curriculum. I argue for complicated conversations on difference which link visual media literacy with social justice issues through pedagogies of tension and epistemologies of doubt.

Author

• Diane Patricia Watt, University of Ottawa