Hina Tabassum Cheema
School of People, Environment and Planning
College of Humanities & Social Sciences
Profile
Thesis Title
Becoming a ‘good’ Muslim Woman: Comparing Habitus and Everyday Lived Religiosity
An Autoethnographic Study of Aotearoa NZ Muslim Women
Research Description
“Deliberate Religiosities and Disjunct Modernities: Muslim Women and (Re)making Selves”. Islam has a history of being misunderstand in the west. This directly affects immigrant Muslims in general and immigrant Muslim women in particular. Muslim women migrate with their embodied practices of piety and their embodiment of modest attire, which stand out at public places as markers of their religion. These godly women (godly is a desire to associate with god and to carry godliness all the time in the body) live at the disjunctures of piety and modernity. The study is an attempt to highlight the disjuncture between these two different worlds on the same canvas; godly and earthly - secular modern. Although, both exist simultaneously, but are divided by a thick dark line that tends to be thicker and darker in everyday critical moments especially with regard to present day debates around the notions of Islam, fundamentalism, terrorism, and women’s rights. Interweaving the concepts of 'habitus', 'field', and 'duration', I will explore the (un)conscious (re)making of selves through the embodied practices of immigrant Muslim women at the disjunctures of modernity and piety.
Personal Description
Hina Cheema is a PhD scholar in the Anthropology program at Massey University, New Zealand. She did her MPhil in Anthropology from Quaid-e-Azam University, Pakistan. Her M.Phil research is on “Education and Social Stratification”. She moved to New Zealand in 2010, and started her PhD in 2015. Her PhD research is fully funded by Higher Education Commission (HEC) Pakistan. In her PhD, she explores the lives of immigrant Muslim women at work places in 21st century New Zealand. It is little wonder that when Hina chose her PhD topic she selected something she had herself experienced.
Supervisors
Associate Professor Sita Venkateswar
Dr Carolyn Morris