Research Associate Nurhaizatul Jamil on ‘Muslim Women Navigating Social Media’

Nurhaizatul Jamil is Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Islam and an HDS WSRP Research Associate for 2021–22. She is teaching the spring 2022 course, "Muslim TikTok, #BLACKOUTEID, IG Activism: Muslim Women Navigating Social Media.”

As Assistant Professor in Global South Studies, co-director of the Global South Center, and co-coordinator of the Social Media Lab at the Pratt Institute, Nurhaizatul teaches courses on gender and sexuality within Muslim communities, Middle Eastern communities and cultures, decolonizing methodologies, and fashion and sustainability studies.

Her current research foregrounds minoritized Muslims’ engagements with social media and popular culture, and their imbrications with transnational circuits of Islamic education and consumption. Below, Nurhaizatul talks about her year-long project at the WSRP, “The 7 Habits of Effective Muslims: Islamic Self-Help and Gendered Disciplining in Contemporary Singapore.”

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I am an ethnographer by training; I have a PhD in anthropology. Ethnography is central to both my research and pedagogy. However, I also think that many ethnographic practices reproduce coloniality. I would like to think of my teaching and research as working to interrogate relationships of power, especially between the “researcher” and the “researched.”

When I first began doing ethnographic work, I was really skeptical of self-help. I was wary of the ways in which the practices of self-help I was analyzing appeared to be aligned with  neoliberal ideals of aspirational becoming that individualizes success and failure. I have since expanded my understanding of self-help to include attempts at cultivating a sense of bodily safety, especially for minoritized subjects.

I am inspired by the words of abolitionist organizer, Mariame Kaba, who emphatically argues that, “hope is a discipline.” If we were to conceive of practices of self-help as attempts to cultivate hope, then what work is this (bodily and emotional) discipline doing? What would it look like if we were to prompt our communities to expand our practices of self-help or self-care to encompass collective care?

A formative moment was when I got the fellowship at the WSRP! Since defending my dissertation, this is the first time I’ve actually been able to dedicate time to thinking and writing. In the process, I’ve started to think of my writing as a deeply meditative practice. This way of thinking has transformed my own relationship to my work. I think very deeply about words and intentionality and the “work” that words do. I love experimenting with genre. This shift in my own approach to writing has enabled me to derive great joy in revising the entire manuscript for submission.

Beyond that, I’d like to quote eminent sociologist Troy Duster, who famously said, “scratch a theory, you find a biography.” So much of my work is inspired by my own positionality as a multiply-minoritized-diasporic-femme subject trying to understand racial capitalism, and strategies for survival and safety.

Regarding my thoughts of social media, I don’t think it’s productive to think about it in binary terms. When we ask whether social media is positive or negative, the actual follow-up question we have to ask is, for whom? I think that social media has expanded Muslim women’s capacity to self-represent, and I really enjoy watching and studying these practices. However, the apparatuses of a surveillance state have also intensified. Communities are surveilled now more than ever. How do we balance the demands for representation with the need to evade legibility? It’s a question my amazing HDS students interrogate weekly in our class on Muslim TIKTOK.

Interview conducted and edited by Madeline Bugeau-Heartt