Muslim Women's Storytelling

This class critically examines how Muslim women negotiate their experience, identity, and narrative in different genres and styles. Students will read Muslim women’s narratives through scholarship, fiction, autobiography, embodied theory, memoir, music, television, and film. Additionally, students will learn relevant theoretical approaches from the field of religious studies and examine materials through the lenses of feminist literary theory, Orientalism, and gendered islamophobia. Learning materials are multimodal, including written, visual, audio, and in-person accounts of the lives of Muslim women. For this class, storytelling is both an object of analysis and a method for learning and presenting research. This class will include engagement and storytelling activities with Atlanta-based Muslim women from various walks of life and professional sectors. Students will learn to identify and analyze some of the diverse socio-cultural contexts that shape how Muslim women see and express themselves in public discourse.

This class is a Public Humanities class. Public Humanities is an approach to humanistic scholarship that prioritizes translating academic knowledge outside of the academy to broad and diverse publics. Public Humanities also values creating knowledge in community, for community. As students research about Muslim Women and their storytelling practices in class, we will work collaboratively to transfer this knowledge outside of the classroom. This class has a community-partnership component. We will work with Diane Capriola from Little Shop of Stories in Decatur, Georgia to create a variety of materials that will help local readers engage with Muslim women’s writing and storytelling.