Visual Transmissions: Ways of Knowing at Zaytuna College

Thursday, February 14, 2013
3:30 – 4:30 pm.
CLA 1.106

Kashani_2013

 

Visual Transmissions: Ways of Knowing at Zaytuna College

Zaytuna College is the first Muslim liberal arts college in the United States. Established in Berkeley, California in 2009, the College brings together first, second, and third generation African American Muslims, White and Latino converts, and the children of immigrants from South Asia, the Caribbean, Africa, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, providing an important manifestation of a multiracial Islam. The wider project examines how racial, gender, class, and devotional differences within American Muslim populations are articulated and experienced through the lenses of Islamic knowledge-practices, Muslim suffering and promise, and cultural production and circulation. The research additionally explores how forms of representation and image-making constitute, suspend, or transform heterogeneous and multiracial collectivities built upon difference.

In this presentation I discuss visuality as an integral part of learning and teaching at Zaytuna College. Corporeal forms of knowing are engaged as students observe particular dispositions and occupy particular spaces. This presentation then looks specifically at my attempts to convey these practices through visual ethnography in ways that complicate the empirical values of video as a form of documentation.

Bio:
Maryam Kashani is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at UT Austin. Her films and videos have been screened internationally.

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