Between Invisibility and Hypervisibility: Reflections on Being ‘Permanently Precarious’ as a British Muslim Woman Within the Ivory Towers of Academia

This chapter adopts an autoethnographic and intersectional perspective in order to critically examine the ways British Muslim women academics are positioned within the academy and the everyday challenges, and macro and microaggressions faced while being an ‘outed’ Muslim woman academic working within UK higher education. Situating myself as a ‘permanently precarious’ Muslim woman academic, and employing a lens of ‘lateness’, I trace how long-term precarity over a 30-year period is representative of the institutionalised racism, Islamophobia, Othering, and marginalisation experienced by Muslim women academics and academics of colour, and highlight the impacts these have on our sense of belonging, confidence, and ability to thrive within the sector. I argue that despite several reports on the racism and Islamophobia experienced by students and staff from Muslim backgrounds, there remains a culture of exclusion that universities need to do more to address. While hiring practices within universities may claim to welcome candidates from diverse backgrounds, I chart how wider research, instead, documents institutionalised, gendered, racialised, and anti-Muslim discriminatory hiring practices across the academy, and highlight the ways these are experienced at a personal level. For those of us working within the niche field of ‘Muslim studies’, I argue that such practices act to further, and routinely undermine ‘our’ expertise on our communities while maintaining the authority of the Western, non-Muslim academic gaze to determine what is worthy of research, and who is worthy of recognition.