Currently, I am a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Human Geography at Queen Mary University of London. My project unpacks the racial histories that inform Black Muslim women’s current lives in London. I ask how Black Muslim women in London create (and embody) spaces of home while navigating the imperial nostalgia and racism exposed through Brexit.
In 2017, I completed my PhD (in Human Geography) at The University of Sheffield on Black feminism and the clothing practices of Black Muslim women. Through this project, I was keen to expose how research about Blackness in Britain and research about British Muslims excludes the experiences of Black Muslims. This pushes against a static reading of Black Muslim women (that are too often constructed as either Black or Muslim). It also moved beyond the hypervisibility of the headscarf within academic and popular debates by unpacking our multiple presentations across different spaces. This project built on how processes of racialisation are felt as we interact with different objects, bodies, gazes and spaces.
This also speaks back to my broader research motivations: I am interested in centring bodies that are often marginalised as Other. My research interests lie across:
- Black feminism
- Critical race studies
- Experiences of Muslims and Islamophobia
- Clothing practices and the presentation of identities
- Academia and the valuing of different spaces of knowledge production
I have also co-edited a collection on anti-racist scholarship in times of explicit racial violence entitled The Fire Now: anti-racist scholarship in times of explicit racial violence.
Azeezat Johnson | Learning through Black feminism 