Ziyyarah: Ethical and Intra-Active Space for Conducting Interviews with Muslim American Students

Authors

Wesam M. Salem, The University of Memphis, Tennessee USAFollow

Abstract

Conducting research with Muslim American participants, who have non-Western roots and are bound to their cultural, linguistic, and religious practices, the prescribed, Eurocentric, and power-laden interviewing practices appear to be unfit and essentializing. This paper extends the argument to de/colonize research practices to create realities that are inclusive of participants' ways of knowing and culture. It also draws from the call for an intra-active and entangled approach to research that emphasizes how researchers and their subjects mutually co-constitute knowledge through their entanglement in the research process. It is also rooted in postcolonial theory, and the concept of the nomadic subject that is fluid and always becoming. By sharing vignettes from an interview, I discuss how creating the methodological space, Ziyyarah, informed my research with Muslim American students and how they position themselves in the spaces they inhabit. I argue that Ziyyarah creates an ethical methodological space for educational researchers that embodies the participants’ cultural practice and embraces the intra-action between family members, conversations, and space.

Keywords

qualitative methods, intra-active, interviews, Ziyyarah, Muslim American students

Author Bio(s)

Dr. Wesam M. Salem is an Assistant Professor of Elementary Education at the University of Memphis. Her research focuses on social justice and equity practices in education particularly pertaining to Muslim American students at the intersectionality of identity, culture, religion, and learning. Also, her work focuses on mathematics teacher educators’ practices in methods courses that promote the implementation of high-leverage practices (e.g., Number Talks, Notice and Wonder) and lesson plans that promote conceptual understanding. Her work has been published in journals such as Peabody Journal of Education, Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, and Multicultural Perspectives. Please direct correspondence to wsalem1@memphis.edu

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Dr. Susan Nordstrom for her support and guidance while writing and conducting this research and for the short and generative discussion with Dr. Kakali Bhattacharya which inspired the name Ziyyarah.

Publication Date

5-31-2025

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.46743/2160-3715/2025.7620

Recommended APA Citation

Salem, W. M. (2025). Ziyyarah: Ethical and intra-active space for conducting interviews with Muslim American students. The Qualitative Report, 30(5), 3553-3574. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2025.7620

ORCID ID

0000-0002-5557-9123