Using intersectionality as a lens, each source reveals a knot where religious identity crosses another axis of power: race, gender, and socioeconomic status interplay in the process of knowledge production. Appiah’s history shows that religion itself is a colonial byproduct: European explorers treated non-Christian cosmologies as othered. Singh’s turban still activates a colonial gaze.
Jawad details how modesty rules become restrictive and publicly policed when they attach to women’s bodies. The same Qur’anic passages commend chastity for men, but it is hijabi women who are excluded from Olympic fields or school teams. Rekis notes that Sojourner Truth was doubly silenced: white Christianity ignored her theology, and secular feminism stripped the faith from her activism. Belief became a reason to rank her testimony as less rational and less political.
Across the resources, two patterns repeat:
Hyper-visibility and erasure: The veil or turban draws attention that renders the wearer hyper-visible as “other,” yet their own explanations are erased. A Muslim athlete may have to remove a hijab to compete, literally disappearing her faith in order to be seen as an athlete.
Gatekept spaces: Erasure is in resistance in co-designing spaces where individuals at intersections can access. Whether the lecture hall (Rekis), the locker room (Jawad), or airport security (Singh), institutions establish apparently ‘neutral’ rules: naturalism in academia, uniform codes in sport, deciding what to expose and what to privatise. This is a privilege for bodies and voices that are shaped by whiteness, maleness, or secular norms.
Jawad’s “Accept and Respect” proposal offers a template: design dress regulations around safety and performance, not around Western customs and standards. Similarly, university syllabi can recognise faith-inflected epistemologies as legitimate knowledge, not private ‘beliefs’. When Singh chats with passengers who are not confronting their internalised racism, he is doing micro-level testimony repair; educators can scale that up by foregrounding insider voices, especiallybecause the emotional labour shouldn’t be on the ones who have lived experience of racism.
Treating faith as a siloed identity misses how it entwines with race, gender, class, and the politics of knowledge. According to Appiah, the very concept of religion is a colonial artefact; while Rekis maps the epistemic fallout when these layers collide. Faith becomes most contested where other power lines cross it. Our task is not to rank which axis matters more but to redesign the spaces where those axes meet, so that no one has to shed either their identity to participate. Intersectionality is indispensable for diagnosing, challenging, and redressing the layered epistemic wrongs that silence voices.
UAL’s census (2023) records that just under half of our students declare a faith: 18 % Muslim, 9 % Christian (non-Anglican), 5 % Hindu, 3 % Sikh, 2 % Buddhist, with a further 10 % selecting “spiritual/other.” Our cohort is also 55 % international and 68 % students of colour. To disrupt classroom gatekeeping, I integrate an investigative journalism workflow in which students “pass the mic” to practitioners and work on a short positionality statement that clarifies power relations are at play.
On a very powerful instance, a journalist was asked from a student ‘how do you get closest to truth’. The journalist replied: ‘I’m not sure I can talk about truth, but I can for sure talk about honesty.’
This requirement of first-person evidence enriches their projects’ factual base and counteracts the hyper-visibility/erasure dynamic. When a speaker is made audible on their own terms, a researcher practises careful listening rather than ventriloquism. Making my lens explicit signals to students that every act of knowledge-making is perspectival and that intellectual honesty begins with acknowledging where one stands before inviting others to speak.
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