If I listen to fellow students, it’ll take me another 4 months of thankless hounding to make any progress.  It’s hard to remain distant from what they say.  I fall into it and start to feel like what they say is truth, like it’s not just their perspective or their experience but ‘the way it is’ for everyone, all the time.  I suppose that’s part of the immersive quality of living and working in an environment—perhaps I’m being immersed in the British pessimism for which this island is so famous?  I’ll tell myself that as a way out of it and cling vehemently to my American positivity.  I never thought it was American as much as I thought it was a result of my mother or my own disposition, but some of the darker varieties are much more willing to attribute it to my national origins, so it seems only fitting that, living here, I should do the same.  What does it matter, anyway?  I am as I am because I am—doesn’t matter much why, really.

Although I guess I only think that in relation to myself, seeing as how my entire project rests on the ‘why’ and ‘how’ behind the way Muslims think of themselves and their own place or belonging here in Britain.

Perhaps that is what we (an American woman and 1.6 million British Muslims) have in common—a need to express or re-express who we are in the face of others’ expectations or assumptions about us.  If I can write about that without sounding too poetically saccharin, I may be able to position my interest in this project as striking right at the core of me and, therefore, being wholly relevant and justifiable.

Although, on that note, it seems ridiculous that we, as social scientists or general inquisitors of the world, should have to ‘justify’ our interest in terms of being rooted in our personal positions in the world.  I can’t be interested in my project ‘for the sake of knowledge’ or ‘because it seems interesting’ or even because ‘theoretically it seems puzzling and I’m into theory’.  All of those answers are still met with eyes which say, “Yes, but there are many things which are interesting or could lead to new knowledge—what is it about THIS project that brought you to it?”  It’s a bit like trying to answer why I like the colour green or what made me fall in love with my soon-to-be husband.  Apparently, I keep giving answers about how tall he is and how he always offers to get me my sweater from upstairs even though I haven’t complained of being cold and, while nice, those are only surface answers.  What is it about his soul, my life, our experiences that made an ‘us’?  I always find that to be relatively unanswerable.  ‘Relatively’ because I try to answer it—I trace my triumphs and losses, I overlay his onto mine, I attempt to draw out some explanatory trajectory of two unrelated paths which then meet—and I always feel, somewhere in the middle of this explanation, that I’m just drawing an impossible picture for people who insist they can see.  And so it is with this project.  Or so it has been up until now.

Today I sit and find myself staring at a possibility which could explain (to others) what it is about THIS project that made me fall in love with it—that drew me to it, that led me to dream it up, that drives me through all the confusion, self-doubt and joy it brings me.

This is a good day.

Enough with these philosophical ramblings.  I’m a second year PhD student, living and researching in the UK, preparing to start my fieldwork.  I’ll be interviewing Muslims born and raised in Britain.  My research is very theoretical, developing an approach to identity that advocates an interaction between what is personal and what is public.  Basically, if I can oversimplify, I’m interested in proving that the way we think of ourselves (our personal identity) is developed in tandem with messages about the groups to which we belong (our public identity).  Now, public identity is mostly relevant for minorities in western liberal democracies, since white men, for example, don’t (need to) gather collectively to gain greater political participation or stronger representation.  I use ‘white men’ in western societies only as an example, not the norm (although there will be those who could argue for them as ‘the norm’).  However, my point is that collective identity, or what I call public identity here, is an identity claimed by minorities as well as attributed to minorities.  An example of this from my own work would be the identity ‘British Muslim’, at once an identity claimed by certain Muslims in Britain and a label used to describe them, imbuing them with attributes of varying levels of accuracy.

I could be making this much more confusing than it needs to be.  My apologies for that.

This blog is an exercise within my research.  I will use it to catalogue the development of my thinking, to record my experiences in interviewing and my reactions to what I find, and to invite those who read it to engage with it–to leave comments, thoughts, arguments or questions, of any length or tone (within reason).  I want to start a conversation, to stimulate my own thinking and yours…so let us think of this as a joint effort.

See you soon.