Faith and Intersectionality

UAL statistics regarding staff and students who have a faith, show a 10% higher declaration rate from staff than students. This made me wonder whether students might be more hesitant to declare their faith, but I need further investigation.

In the YouTube video “Challenging Race, Religion, and Stereotypes in Classroom,” Simran Jeet Singh, a Religion Professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, discusses the importance of addressing and challenging stereotypes related to race and religion in educational settings. Singh points out that while we tend to view communities as homogenous, each community is diverse. This relates to a complexity around this unit – the struggle to reconcile differences between minority groups, such as religions and LGBTQ+ rights. In the online session it was noted that it can be difficult to be a mediator in the classroom, so looking at how faith can be expressed in multi faceted ways can be a starting point; religions are not a homogenous group so we could discuss if there is a breadth of perpectives within that religion for instance.

Singh highlights specific strategies and personal anecdotes to illustrate effective teaching methods for combating stereotypes: ‘what I like to do in my classroom or in my advocacy or even when I’m out on the street is try and demonstrate the differences that exist within these communities by challenging basic stereotypes’ so he ‘strike(s) up conversations and smile(s) and laugh(s)’ In addition he also says ‘If we can try and understand where people are coming from with empathy with sort of a human element then that allows us to really engage with difference in a way that is constructive rather than destructive’. His approach, which emphasises everyone’s common humanity and with it, empathy, while creating dialogue amongst students, resonates with my approach because it helps students engage with differences constructively. When teaching technical Adobe sessions, I encourage students to engage in a 15-minute collaborative drawing project at the start. This exercise fosters collaborative discussion and counters the isolation of sitting behind a screen for three hours. Additionally, I am considering changes to the layout of computer rooms to facilitate group work and collaboration, which are currently hindered.

Reki’s article explores Miranda Fricker’s two forms of epistemic injustice in the context of religious identity and its intersections with race and gender. For instance, Muslim women who veil may face testimonial injustice due to stereotypes about their religion and dress. Additionally, hermeneutical injustice occurs when the experiences of religious individuals are not adequately understood or represented in societal discourse, leading to their marginalisation. Hermeneutical Injustice occurs when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage in making sense of their social experiences. For instance, before “sexual harassment” was widely recognised, many women struggled to articulate their experiences of workplace misconduct. Reki emphasises considering multiple aspects of identity and intersectionality to fully understand and address epistemic injustices faced by religious individuals.

The Online session discussed the legally protected characteristics of religious and cultural observances, so if there is a structural and predictable outcome, such as the effects of fasting for Ramadan on students, we have a legal duty to remove barriers. UAL has a faith and religion calendar which I will refer to so that I can plan my projects to have least impact on students.