Academia is frequently a hostile place where students, pre‐tenure scholars, women, people of color, disabled, queer, transgender, and nonbinary people face perpetual challenges. “You do not belong here” or “you are not good enough” can feel like a constant refrain. Yet some students find their path and pursue their graduate studies with determination, or even passion, joy, and a sense of satisfaction. A successful mentoring relationship with a faculty member can contribute to that success. This article tells the story of how two very differently positioned women in academia forged a unique mentoring relationship that produced unexpected and positive outcomes. One measure of this relationship's success is the student's transformation from hesitant master's student to confident doctoral student pursuing a self‐designed multidisciplinary doctoral degree. Less tangibly but no less important, the increasingly reciprocal and horizontal nature of this mentoring relationship allowed both parties to take risks in their academic lives and to step into more liberatory modes of knowing and being in the academy. In this article we, a white American tenured faculty advisor and a Saudi‐American Muslim woman PhD advisee, trace some of the key turning points in this advising story through a duo‐autoethnographic (duoethnography: a collaborative research methodology in which two or more researchers juxtapose their life histories in order to provide multiple understandings of a social phenomenon) dialogue. We relay how our mentoring relationship allowed each of us to transcend our scripted academic roles and fostered an enabling environment for doctoral study and risky scholarship. We acknowledge that mentoring is not a one‐size‐fits‐all approach, yet we hope that by highlighting some dimensions of our relationship we might inform others seeking a feminist, relational, horizontal, supportive model for academic mentoring.

Centering colonialism in feminist and feminist world politics studies and activism disables genderwashing, or the process by which colonial projects are carried on in the name of women's rights, in order to practice more ethical politics and solidarity.(Runyan, 2018, p. 5) 1011517F ER0010.1177/01417789211011517Feminist ReviewHasnaa Mokhtar research-article2021 open space 'You're the only one in a Western university who rejects Western knowledge.' 'Some of us have to make a living.' 'You have to mature.'

The author uses a decolonial feminist lens to interrogate the collection of research data on gender violence in Kuwait City. Doing so, she draws attention to how colonial ways of producing knowledge on the Arab Gulf countries have aided and sustained state-led and religiously sanctioned structural and interpersonal violence in the region. Through an embodied, intersectional analysis, she highlights how scholarly literature and development-led reports are devoid of gendered, local realities.

Multiple social movements (e.g., Black Lives Matter, The Combahee River Collective, Musawah, and #MeToo) have highlighted the systems of oppression (e.g., racism, sexism, Islamophobia, and classism) in this country and globally that have targeted different marginalized groups. The traumatic experiences of gender-based violence (GBV) are compounded by the trauma of a long history of structural violence and the unique experiences of different social identities, including race, religion, and gender. One example in the Muslim American context is how Oyewuwo (2019) analyzes the unique experiences of Black Muslim women seeking help for GBV. Her work illustrates the ways in which these women, growing up in a system of oppression and injustice, shaped their response to GBV by creating patterns in which they endure violence and pain. As a South-Asian-American and an Arab-American researching GBV and working within the field, we ask: how do we, members of the Muslim community, become allies for Muslims experiencing GBV within the context of systematic oppression (in ways that prevent privileged groups from reproducing and maintaining patterns of inequality)? In this paper, we aim to envision possibilities for our role as allies by looking into the intersection of Islamophobia, racism, sexism, and domestic violence within Muslim communities. We present a theoretical background to some of the existing literature on intersectionality and allyship and provide a framework to combine them. The resulting framework will build off existing social movements and apply these learnings to the context of GBV within the Muslim context. Finally, this framework gives community allies, including faith leaders, activists, and community members, a guideline on the role they play in this critical social issue.

No abstract