Mapping the Margins: How Black Muslim Women Sense, Make Sense of, and Develop Spatial Sensibilities through Public Space

Zoom link: torontomu.zoom.us/j/98545339983?pwd=IF2tp7jvjaYdAilPwwb5EaKmRxRKJj.1

Meeting ID: 985 4533 9983 Passcode: 157992 

Speaker: Dr. Ismahan Yusuf, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies

Summary: Since the 1990s, feminist and critical space scholarship has become increasingly attentive to how racialized and gendered (e.g., Black women) as well as religious and gendered (e.g., Muslim women) groups negotiate marginalization in urban space. Despite this growth in research, few studies have ventured to critically examine the geographies of women at the axis of these social locations: Black Muslim women. In the absence of research focused on Black Muslim women’s public geographies in the Canadian canon, my research portfolio— comprised of my dissertation and current ongoing projects — are an effort to craft the inaugural frames for understanding the implications of, as well as the collective experiences that arise from, existing at this hyper-invisible intersection. My talk will offer a high level overview of my research endeavours to date, which include my introduction of the term "musogynoir" to name the specific marginalization Black Muslim women negotiate when anti-Blackness, misogyny, and gendered Islamophobia interact(s) in everyday place.

Bio: An intersectional feminist geographer, Dr. Ismahan Yusuf’s research is marked by a thematic focus on power, positionality, and place. Intersectionality remains a throughline in her work, routinely engaging it to contemplate how marginalized people’s experiences dovetail and diverge across ethnicities, genders, sexualities, classes, religions, abilities, ages, and locations (among many others). Dr. Yusuf’s work predominantly centers on racialized Muslim women’s experiences of public and private spaces in and across the settle colonial Canadian context.