Inclusive Practices Blog Task 2: Faith, religion, and belief

Hypervisible, Yet Silenced: Faith, Race and Epistemic Injustice

Until recently I had never been exposed to the need to critically engage with the theme of faith, religion and belief in the context of the classroom and the academic curriculum.  Early this year, three students arrived late to my session. I called them out in front of the class. They later explained they were late because of their daily prayer. I felt and still feel embarrassed.

What troubles me the most about this episode is that, coming from a position of privilege as a white, able-bodied tutor with a Catholic background, by publicly calling out their lateness I may have further legitimised a discriminatory gaze from their peers, as if my authority could, in future, license others to do the same. This to me highlighted an intersectional issue that overlaps with the epistemic injustice of institutional structures that render some identities as requiring justification for their religious practices (Rekis 2023). As Muslim women wearing a hijab in a Western university, my three students face a triple burden (Ramadan, 2022; Rekis 2023): their religion is racialised, their gender is used to assume their beliefs, and their dress becomes an involuntary form of testimony that can be misread. As veiled women, my callout rendered them hyper-visible, yet silenced, seen, but not actually heard (Rekis, 2023).

After asking them to share their prayer schedule in advance I now question why is the responsibility placed on them as individuals to let me know? The timetable of the curriculum itself encodes a default secular norm. Advance HE (2018) recommends to always permit Muslim staff and students to go to pray when required, and that institutions should proactively communicate this expectation to staff, not just to students.
The institution falls short in providing us with the religious literacy and knowledge necessary to support all our students. There should be guidance on how different religious practices and needs can be supported. Although this is not an excuse, it highlights the structural problem that compounds racial discrimination. 

A starker example is when last year, my student in his final year of architecture, was called to multiple meetings with a group of senior staff that felt like “interrogations”, making him feel accused of involvement in terrorist activity because he had organised activities in which a student had written an Arabic name, potentially aligning with the name of a terrorist. At that time, he worked as the representative of the Islamic Society at CSM and was very active in the anti-war movement for Gaza. This to me was Anti-Muslim sentiment manifesting in the criminalisation of people because of their outlooks or their beliefs. Jawad (2022) underscores that visibility itself becomes a site of discrimination: the body that looks Muslim is treated as suspect. Crenshaw’s intersectionality (1991) helps us understand that his race, religion, and political engagement compounded into a form institutional suspicion that a white, non-Muslim student would not have faced.

The body, as Kern (2020) writes, is “the geography closest in”, the first site of the lived experience, where identity, religion, race and (institutional) space collide. To teach inclusively perhaps is to begin there: giving space to multiple bodies to voice the diversity of lived experiences they hold. By foregrounding empathy, active listening, and engaging with difference in a way that is constructive rather than destructive (Trinity University, 2016) we can start to continuously ask what works and what doesn’t to transform barriers to participation into opportunities for knowledge creation.

References
Advance HE (2018) Religion and belief: supporting inclusion of staff and students in higher education and colleges. Section 3: Student inclusion: access, experience and learning. Available at: https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/ecu/Religion_and_belief-Section_3-Student_inclusion-access_experience_and_learning_1579783006.pdf (Accessed: 12 May 2026).

Crenshaw, K. (1991) ‘Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color’, Stanford Law Review, 43(6), pp. 1241–1299. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1229039 (Accessed: 12 May 2026).

Jawad, H. (2022) ‘Islam, women and sport: the case of visible Muslim women’, LSE Religion and Global Society Blog, September. Available at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/religionglobalsociety/2022/09/islam-women-and-sport-the-case-of-visible-muslim-women/ (Accessed: 12 May 2026).

Kern, L. (2020) Feminist city: claiming space in a man-made world. London: Verso.

Ramadan, I. (2022) ‘When faith intersects with gender: the challenges and successes in the experiences of Muslim women academics’, Gender and Education, 34(1), pp. 33–48. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2021.1893664(Accessed: 12 May 2026).

Reki, J. (2023) ‘Religious identity and epistemic injustice: an intersectional account’, Hypatia, 38, pp. 779–800.

Trinity University (2016) Challenging race, religion, and stereotypes in the classroom [Online video]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CAOKTo_DOk (Accessed: 12 May 2026).