This summer I had the opportunity to work with Professor Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, researching contemporary Muslim Americans’ conceptions of time, and how Muslim Americans view themselves as fitting into the idea of American progress and American future. We performed this research by reading memoirs by Muslim Americans from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. We were able to use these first-person accounts of life as primary sources for analysis, specifically focusing on how the individuals wrote about time in their narratives.
I read a variety of memoirs and first-person accounts by Muslims of different races, genders, and educational backgrounds. These ranged from works by activists and academics, immigrants and U.S.-born citizens. I coded them for mentions of time, including the structure of the memoir as it related to time. I took notes on important passages as they related to time and progress, synthesized connections between memoirs, and summarized my thoughts. Then, after I had completed these steps for each memoir, I met with my research advisor where we discussed my findings, and he was able to help me work through what were often complex ideas regarding the definition of progress and the relationship between place and time.
A particularly generative meeting was the one that we had after I had finished the initial books that Professor GhaneaBassiri had assigned me. We met to attempt to put all the texts into conversation with one another. We started with defining “progress” and “the West,” two concepts that, while essential to the research, were also complex and difficult to define at times. We then moved to trying to place each of the texts on a timeline to create a thesis about how Muslim Americans articulated social hierarchies post 9/11. While this was a helpful exercise, we ended up concluding that each memoir seemed to approach the idea of progress and the future in a different way. Based on this, we redirected to find the most pertinent examples of each type of framing of, and attitude towards, the future, so that the project could revolve around charting specific examples, rather than trying to find an overarching thesis about how Muslim Americans view progress. This experience of switching courses when we were not experiencing immediate success with the project taught me a lot about the research process. Rather than viewing the work we had done during this meeting as wasted effort, I learned to think of it as a stepping stone in the research process, and although it was not an endpoint, the work we did proved helpful as we moved forward in the project.
I am incredibly grateful for this opportunity to engage in academic research this summer, as I both had the opportunity to explore a new and interesting academic concept and learn about the research process. I would like to thank my faculty advisor, and the Carleton Research Partnership program for enabling this experience.