The Contested Phenomenon: Intersectional Identities

Despite the current hyper-marketised higher education (HE) system obsessed with displaying “happy colourful faces” of diversity, there is a prevalence of deficit labels such as “BAME” which has created marginalised rhetoric which removes Muslim students from the traditional experience. For minoritised students like Muslim women, it fails to provide them with information about substantive experiences—relying on appearance and imagery—rendering them and their actual needs invisible. Thus, as a contested phenomenon in the HE space, the terrain traversed can be traumatic, and cause mental fatigue, which can often reveal itself in the form of lower attainment, increased anxieties, and cultural pressures. From generation Jihad to generation M, the Muslim female student population is often fixed by the white gaze, and this chapter seeks to explore how “a racialised episteme is interrupted” or disorientated through accounts of a brown Muslim student-lecturer in a modern university.