The use of double-consciousness has important consequences for the framing of this project and my own role within the academy. In exploring the relationship had to fixed categories (and to the knowledge that categorises us), Black feminists across
disciplines have challenged academia’s role as the legitimiser and holder of knowledge about Black women as researched Other to the white male academic Self (e.g. Collins, 1990; hooks, 1989; Lorde, 1996; Nayak, 2015). They have emphasized spaces of knowledge production outside of academia that have been essential to developing knowledge (and ways of knowing) about our Blackness.
Reclaiming the Black feminist intellectual tradition also involves searching for its expression in alternative institutional locations and among women who are not commonly perceived as intellectuals (Collins, 1990: 14).
This process of reclamation includes mining music, literature, daily conversations and everyday behaviour as critical spaces of knowledge production (Collins, 1990; hooks, 1989; Noxolo, 1999). This pushes for a fundamental shift in the way knowledge claims are legitimised by challenging the distance perpetuated when knowledge is produced ‘in here’ about bodies ‘out there.’ Interactions with participants cannot be fixed as sites ‘in the field’ wherein ‘data’ can be retrieved and transformed into knowledge by The Academic.
In order to challenge the Self/Other binary, there must be a challenge to the dynamics that construct the academic Self as distant from the researched Other. Using double- consciousness to explore the relationship to the Self/Other binary also means building research relationships that focus on Black Muslim women as knowledge producers across different sites, including some that are not legitimised by academia. The
relationships built between myself and the other Black Muslim women participating in this project speaks to the exchange and production of different knowledges.
Despite the interview process reflecting knowledge constructed with participants (Denzin, 2009; Khan, 2005), the writing process requires me to construct my own imagining of the world wherein participants’ experiences and knowledges are interpreted.
The “Other” who is presented in the text is always a version of the researcher’s self. Krieger argues: “When we discuss others, we are always talking about ourselves. Our images of ‘them’ are images of ‘us’ (Denzin, 2009: 92).
Embedded in Denzin’s (2009) understanding of the interpretive researcher is the assumption of distance (and difference) between the researcher and the researched. In doing so, Denzin (2009) perpetuates this Self/Other binary. Yet what happens to those of us who are a part of the communities that are being written about? How do we
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highlight the potential within understanding research relationships as more than this distance (and/or deviance) from one another?
It is within this context and in response to Haraway’s (1988) critique of objectivity that I use “us” and “we” to situate myself within this grouping of Black Muslim women. This is done reflexively, much like Collins (1990) when positioning herself within the African-American women that she researches: terms such as “they” and “their” imply an ability to distance one’s racialized and gendered embodiment from the academic writing produced from that positioning (Noxolo, 2009). I hold onto my own
experiences as someone who is racialized and gendered as a Black Muslim woman (and who holds a British passport). These processes inform what and how I read
experiences of Black Muslim women, as well as how I interact with participants (and vice versa). They inform and construct the research that is then produced.
This does not assume that my own situated experiences within this ‘grouping’ would negate the unknown ways that power permeates the research process (Rose, 1997). At different points in time, I maintain the distinctions between “them” as participants that shaped and shared knowledge through interviews and clothes journals, and “I” as the researcher who continues to interact with their words to construct this written world. Signalling my own role as part of yet apart from this grouping works to highlight the complexity within the grouping of Black Muslim women. One of the strengths of this project is the use of intersectionality to question how these social discourses produce different experiences of being (a Black Muslim woman). As I look to highlight how identification is ‘produced, experienced, reproduced, and resisted in everyday life’ (McCall, 2005: 1783), it only strengthens this research to reflexively situate myself as an illustration of this process, as both researcher and researched.
Through reflexivity, I use the research relationships as spaces where knowledge is shared between myself and participants about the clothing practices of Black Muslim women. Some of these performances were recognisable to one another, others
highlighted the differences that exist within this grouping. It is within these exchanges that we find, share and stitch together the different ways Black Muslim women
construct their beings. This works to highlight Presser’s (2005: 2086, emphasis in original) point that ‘we must go beyond simply writing ourselves into research interviews to writing our exchanges into them.’
I am again wary of any reading of these exchanges as ‘totally’
communicated/understood in the omniscient manner assumed by the ‘goddess trick’ (Rose, 1997). Rather, this highlights that knowledge of (and by) any arbitrary grouping cannot be ‘complete’ in any sense. We are continuously being made through our interactions, and thus knowledge about our experiences/existence is constantly being produced and reproduced. I use these interactions to push for an understanding of identities as fluid rather than static processes.
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It is these epistemological considerations that grounds the rest of the project. From here, I expand on the practical details surrounding designing a research project with Black Muslim women in Britain.