Decolonizing geography of the Middle East: utilizing feminist pedagogical strategies to reconstruct the classroom

Abstract

This intervention reflects on what we can do to decolonize our pedagogy using a feminist relational ethics of teaching. I reflect on my day-to-day journey attempting to transform my Geography of the Middle East course from my embodied position as the only Muslim, Middle Eastern female in a white, male-dominated geography department. I consider my embodied role, teaching a course that historically is rooted in a patriarchal, colonialist-capitalist perspective. I explore my efforts to bring feminist scholarship into my classroom to expose the lived reality of Muslims, especially women in Islam. By acquiring feminist pedagogical strategies and facing my own embodied positionality, I wanted my students to re-think the student-teacher relationship, shifting the classroom from a one-sided learning experience to a shared journey. By exposing our biases and sharing our personal stories, we encountered and lent voice to socially-structured taboos: the current Islamophobic culture, the myth of ‘oppressed’ Muslim women needing saving from their own culture and religion; and the identity of the ‘terrorist’ fallen through the gap between cultures. Consequently, an active and fluid learning environment replaced the fixed and one-sided pedantic interaction. A relational pedagogical approach allowed us to think about the Middle East in a way that challenged enduring colonial attitudes, narratives, and relationships and to rethink our own positions within them.

Keywords:

• Geography of the Middle East
• feminist pedagogy
• feminist praxis
• reflexivity

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Kelsey Emrad for inviting me to an AAG panel in 2019 that formed the basis of this special issue and this paper. I’m deeply thankful for her continued encouragement and feedback. I also would like to thank Kanchana N Ruwanpura and the anonymous reviewers whose guidance made this possible. Lastly, I owe a debt to all the scholars I cited in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hanieh Haji Molana

Hanieh Haji Molana is an Assistant Professor of Geography at California State University, Sacramento. She received her PhD in Geography at Kent State University. Her research focuses on Muslim female Middle Eastern immigrants’ lived experiences in the U.S. She is particularly interested in collecting stories and bringing subjective voices into the expansion of feminist geographic knowledge. Her work builds on feminist and decolonial methodology within the context of the Middle East.