The Impact of the Current Student Loans Regime on Muslim Student Engagement and Retention in English Higher Education


Posted by hallymk1

With Yusraa Maryam and Sumeya Loonat, I have published a report on The Impact of the Current Student Loans Regime on Muslim Student Engagement and Retention in English Higher Education. The report is based on project work undertaken in the Spring/Summer of 2024, which pivoted around interviews with 12 Muslim undergraduate and post-graduate taught students, who see interest-bearing loans as a barrier to their engagement in higher education. The work was funded internally by De Montfort University’s Academic Innovation Project fund.

front cover of research report, titled: The Impact of the Current Student Loans Regime on Muslim Student Engagement and Retention in English Higher Education

It was a privilege to work with Yusraa and Sumeya on this project. Our conversations with the student participants were a gift that we wish to acknowledge. We are also very grateful for the support of the DMU Imam, Mohammed Laher, and the Prayer Room committee at DMU, alongside the Islamic Society.

The report is available here, and can be cited as:

Hall, R., Maryam, Y., and Loonat, S. (2025) The Impact of the Current Student Loans Regime on Muslim Student Engagement and Retention in English Higher Education. Leicester: De Montfort University. https://hdl.handle.net/2086/24766
Abstract

There is much interest in the potential for an alternative funding system for higher education students in England to support the spiritual and worldly needs of British Muslim students. At present those who wish to study in English universities and HE providers are still tied to a financial system that is contentious for many because it is predicated upon paying back interest, known as riba. From Arabic, riba points towards financial arrangements that are a form of usury, and are seen to be exploitative. This is haram, or forbidden, for practicing Muslims. The relationship between access to (and progression through) academic study and engagement with finance is contentious where it reveals the tensions between Islam as a deeply-spiritual, faith-based way of life (in Arabic, deen), and the reality that this way of life is lived, materially, in a worldly existence (in Arabic, dunya).

The extent to which these tensions both play out for Muslim students and impact their lived experiences of HE has received limited attention. Although recent UK Governments have promised an alternative system, and have even engaged in consultation on the issue, there is a need for richer educational research on the impact of this system on Muslims who are trying to adhere to Islamic teachings This report engages with this gap, and discusses one Academic Innovation Project (AIP), funded at De Montfort University (DMU) in the 2023/24 academic session. This project developed, cross-institutionally, the outcomes of a third-year, DMU Education Studies dissertation undertaken in 2022/23, by Yusraa Maryam (with Richard Hall as her supervisor). This dissertation undertook a small scale, qualitative investigation of the experiences of Muslim students who saw interest-bearing loans as a barrier to their higher learning. In the AIP, Yusraa and Richard, working with Sumeya Loonat, extended and enhanced this pilot. Sumeya, a DMU PhD student and a British Muslim female, acted as a research mentor to Yusraa, and this enabled the team to ground this student-led research around retention. At its heart lay a desire to explore the factors that shape retention for Muslim students who see student loans as a barrier to their retention and ability to stay the course.

Thus, we focus on the outcomes of in-depth interviews with 12 British Muslim undergraduate and postgraduate taught students, which were designed to evaluate the impacts of interest-bearing loans on Muslim students retention in one University in English HE. The analysis of these interviews highlighted how the struggle between the spiritual deen and the worldly dunya shaped much of what was reported by these students, with money challenging and conditioning faith. In this, the complex ways in which individuals engage with student finance were related to their spiritual intentions, and this then shaped their educational experiences and choices. Whilst the role of family was important in engaging with their studies, this struggle had an affective, emotional impact. In managing these outcomes, the students demonstrate very deep layers of inner faith, commitment, drive and hope for the future. These are also moulded in family and in community. At the same time, our participants made a plea for the recognition of the significance of this issue for students like them by University senior leaders. At the core of this work, we note that these students are engaged in a struggle for recognition, and in this they deserve to be heard.


DMU Muslim-Friendly Universities Audit: how British Muslim, first-year students experience their Muslimness in HE spaces


Posted by hallymk1

Overview

I am really pleased that with Lucy Ansley, Sumeya Loonat and Lamia Nemouchi, we are being funded by The Aziz Foundation to undertake an audit focuses upon the wider, student experience of British Muslim, first-year undergraduate students at De Montfort University (DMU). It situates this experience against their faith, and also in relation to ethnicity, gender and disability, in order to understand how these students experience their Muslimness in higher education (HE) spaces. The intention is that this will materially impact the ways in which universities can recognise intersectional and faith-based complexities in the undergraduate student experience.

A primary gain will be for universities to consider how to enhance their engagement with the richness of British Muslim student identities, in order to support the retention of the students. A secondary gain will be for universities to put in place structures, cultures and practices that anchor their relationships with these groups of students, such that they are able to rebuild the bridge between undergraduate and postgraduate taught provision (Samatar, Sardar and The Aziz Foundation, 2023).

The audit connects to the Aziz Foundation’s proposed audit areas of faith provision, workplace culture/ inclusion, and academic experience. It specifically focuses upon all British Muslim, first-year students at DMU, who will begin their undergraduate study during academic session 2024/25. It has the following aim.

  • To analyse how British Muslim, first-year students experience their Muslimness in HE spaces.

Higher Education spaces refers to the physical, and virtual environments and the institutional system in place within which the academic, social and personal development of the students occurs when pursuing higher education. HERE The audit has the following, linked objectives.

  • To identify how British Muslim, first-year students perceive their religious identity (Muslimness) when planning to pursue HE.
  • To identify intersectional factors, including ethnicity, gender and disability, that impact the experience of British Muslim, first-year students.
  • To explore institutional strategies to ensure the retention of British Muslim, first-year students.

Background

Whilst much work has been undertaken in the United Kingdom (UK) on the awarding gap (see, for instance, Universities UK, 2022), this has often been conflated with work on decolonising (see, for instance, Hall, Ansley and Connolly, 2023; Shain et al., 2021). Within university access and participation plans, there has been a focus on student-centred approaches, belonging, and inclusive learning environments, although the pivot for this has tended to be the awarding gap, rather than social justice. Moreover, there has been a lack of focus upon students of faith in general and British Muslim students in particular (Stevenson 2014), and the socio-cultural practices and environmental factors that impact their belonging within UK HE (Islam, Lowe and Jones 2019).

This has tended to limit the opportunity for institutions to engage productively and generatively with the complexity of the student experience, and to enrich that experience. This is in spite of a history of reporting of the negative impacts on the British Muslim student experience (see, for instance, Office for Students, 2021), and the recommendation by Universities UK (2022) of the need for ‘A greater push to implement university-wide change is needed so that the work that universities are doing to create inclusive communities is fully reflected in students’ experiences.’ Whilst this is a complex terrain that focuses attention upon structural constraints and barrier, communal cultures, and individual and collective identities, deep work is required to enable HE institutions to engage with such complexity.

Yet, a range of issues impact the British Muslim student identities, including: support for the representation and expression of faith on campus; access to appropriate funding for study; Islamophobia (amplified recently in relation to Palestine); surveillance and the Prevent strategy; the relationship between universities, students unions, and Islamic societies; and, the availability of and access to appropriate, faith-based spaces and environments. Stevenson (2018) has highlighted the intersecting impacts of these issues with a clear focus upon the need for religious literacy. This is more important for institutions, precisely because the Muslim experience of HE ‘is not homogeneous, and their experiences are therefore shaped differently, which impacts on their life choices and outcomes’ (Malik and Wykes, 2018: 17). Hence, there is a need to understand these experiences in order to make HE as inclusive for British Muslim students as their non-Muslim/religious peers.

Our audit works from the basis that the concept of identity remains complex, multifaceted and intricately linked to cultural, social and historical contexts (Hall 1990). It recognises that the British Muslim student experience in UK universities is conditioned by a range of representations of Muslim people and Muslimness, which have tended to exacerbate the marginalisation and stigmatisation of Muslim individuals, or Muslimness as an identity facet (Ali and Whitham, 2018). This has also led to self-censorship (Guest et al., 2020). Of course, the impacts of traumatic events like the pandemic and the war on Gaza shape societal, institutional and individual representations. However, the audit team wish to use this complexity, in order to understand how these students internalise and express their Muslimness in relation to their specific learning environments.

The audit team wish to understand how the active or passive engagement of institutions with negative stereotypes about Islam can: first, contribute to the internalisation of feelings of othering, potentially affecting access of Muslim students to HE (Islam, Lowe and Jones 2019); second, shape their experience within HE to reinforce these self-perceptions through lived experience of microaggressions, subtle biases, exclusionary practices (Ahmed, 2012) or practices that neglect religious identities; and, third, understand how these students celebrate their identity in relation to Islam as a holistic system, or ‘a way of life, a code of laws, a complete system encompassing and integrating the political, social, and economic, as well as personal, moral, and spiritual aspects of life’ (Dabashi 1993: 439).

Research Overview

The audit team’s approach will utilise an interpretivist approach inside a mixed methods study. This will enable the collection and interpretation of data that are contextually-detailed, and will also reflect upon the positionality of the research team. In all of our work, researcher positionality is central, and needs to be clearly articulated in the context of this specific research.

As British Muslims, two of the Co-Investigators meet the study’s participant criteria (Loonat and Maryam), whilst a third member of the team has extensive fieldwork engagement with decolonial and faith-based experiences of education as an international, Muslim researcher (Nemouchi). Both the Principal Investigator (Hall) and fourth Co-Investigator (Ansley) have extensive experience in pedagogic and educational research, in relation to decolonising and anti-racist practice.

A final benefit for the project is its contribution to a culture of co-creation, which is well established within the Education Studies Division at DMU. Work with second-year British Muslim students, who have lived experience or awareness of the issues faced by their first-year peers, is central to this proposal. We intend that four current 1st year British Muslim students (cohort 2023/24) will be recruited to join the project team, in order to shape the evaluation and help discuss its findings.

This audit seeks to explore the lived experience of British Muslim first-year undergraduates through a qualitative approach that centres student voice. Using survey and focus group methods, students will be asked to reflect upon their early experiences on campus, in relation to their Muslimness. Reflexive thematic analysis will then be used to identify findings from the data, recognising the interaction between data and researchers (Braun and Clarke 2023).

An anonymous survey was drafted using themes from the literature surrounding Muslim student experience in HE. Themes such as university choice, accommodation, societies, campus facilities and relationships are discussed. These were considered through the lens of the initial stages of the undergraduate journey (Humphrey and Lowe 2017) before being further refined into three sections: application, welcome and first weeks. In this way, the survey will capture student reflections on this pivotal transition into higher education.

The existing literature highlights the many and varied ways in which British Muslim students are negatively impacted by their university experience, and so we did not want to take an overly deficit-based approach to our questioning, but rather to offer neutrally framed prompts that enable both positive and negative reflections. The survey will undergo consultation with our Student Advisors early in the autumn term before being launched in November. In addition to questions regarding their experience, demographic data will be gathered to provide an overview of the perspectives represented within the survey data, and allow for intersectional analysis. To ensure student anonymity, only faculty of study will be collected, meaning that students are not identifiable from their demographic information.

Focus groups will then be used to add greater depth to the themes emerging from the survey data, and to explore those question areas in more detail. A draft schedule was developed, influenced by the research literature, and this will also be presented to our Student Advisors for feedback. Alongside each focus group, the research team will make personal research memos about the sessions, noting atmosphere, distribution of participants and any non-verbal cues that may be of analytical significance, to provide additional context for the analysis process.

Researcher memos, or reflective diaries, will play a central role throughout the study and will be completed by both academic staff members and the Student Advisors. The diaries will focus upon the research team’s experience of the analytical and methodological process, as well as their positionality throughout. The research team believe that reflexivity is an iterative process, not a check box exercise, and that authentic exploration of researcher positionality is a continual exercise throughout a study (Gani and Khan 2024, Braun and Clarke 2023). The diary writing process is therefore a useful tool in supporting the research team in maintaining their reflexivity throughout.

NB within the study as a whole, religion or belief is a key inclusion/exclusion criterion, and as a result a full Data Protection Impact Assessment is required and has been signed off. All data will be managed in transit and at rest on encrypted, DMU technologies, and as soon as transcription has been undertaken, transcripts and original data files (voice recordings, field notes) will be destroyed by the PI from those technologies or by shredding as part of DMU’s management of confidential waste. Under the agreed DPIA there will be no way for the PI to contact participants individually. In order to maintain anonymity no linking data or emails will be stored. So, for instance, where students have moved on from DMU and are no longer members of the Prayer Room or Islamic Society we will not be able to contact them directly. Anonymity and confidentiality are key. Note that an Interim Report has been submitted to The Aziz Foundation. Once this is agreed it will be published on DMU’s Research Repository.

Hall, R. Ansley, L., Loonat, S., and Nemouchi, L. (2024). Scoping a Muslim friendly Universities audit: DMU Interim Report. De Montfort University/The Aziz Foundation. https://hdl.handle.net/2086/24270

References

The Aziz Foundation: https://www.azizfoundation.org.uk/.

Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Allen, C. (2023) Everyday experiences of Islamophobia in university spaces: A qualitative study in the United Kingdom. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice. https://doi.org/10.1177/17461979231210996

Ali, N., and Whitham, B. (2018). The unbearable anxiety of being: Ideological fantasies of British Muslims beyond the politics of security. Security Dialogue, 49(5): 400-418. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010618794050 

Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2023) Toward good practice in thematic analysis: Avoiding common problems and be(com)ing a knowing researcher. International Journal of Transgender Health, 24(1), pp. 1-6.

Dabashi, H. (1993). Theology of discontent: the ideological foundations of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. New York: New York University Press.

Gani, J.K. and Khan, R.M. (2024) Positionality Statements as a function of coloniality: interrogating reflexive methodologies. International Studies Quarterly, 68(2). https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqae038

Guest, M., Scott-Baumann, A., Cheruvallil-Contractor, S., Naguib, S., Phoenix, A., Lee, Y. and Al Baghal, T. (2020) Islam and Muslims on UK University Campuses: Perceptions and Challenges. Durham: Durham University, London: SOAS, Coventry: Coventry University and Lancaster: Lancaster University. https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/33345/1/file148310.pdf 

Habermann, M. (2014) ‘Islamic Finance and the Student Loan Market for Muslim-Americans’, Undergraduate Journal of Humanistic Studies, 1, pp.1-13. Available at: http://carleton-wp-prod…07/Mike_Habermann_2.pdf 

Hall, R., Ansley, L., and Connolly, P. (2023). Decolonising or anti-racism? Exploring the limits of possibility in higher education, Teaching in Higher Education. DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2023.2201676

Humphrey, O. and Lowe, T. (2017) Exploring how a ‘Sense of Belonging’ is facilitated at different stages of the student journey in Higher Education. Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership and Change, 3(1). https://winchester.elsevierpure.com/files/340639/788788_Lowe_ExploringHowSenseofBelonging_original_deposit_with_set_statement.pdf  

Islam, M. Lowe, I., & Jones, J. (2019). A ‘satisfied settling’? Investigating a sense of belonging for Muslim students in a UK small-medium Higher Education Institution. Student Engagement in Higher Education Journal, 2(2): 79-104.

Malik, A. and Wykes, E. (2018). British Muslims in UK Higher Education: Socio-political, religious and policy considerations. London: Bridge Institute. https://www.azizfoundat…er-Education-report.pdf

Samatar, A., Sardar, Z., and The Aziz Foundation (2023). Transitions: British Muslims between undergraduate and PGT studies. London: The Aziz Foundation.

Shain, F., Yıldız, U.K., Poku, V. and Gokay, B. (2021) From silence to ‘strategic advancement’: institutional responses to decolonising in higher education in England. Teaching in Higher Education. 26 (7-8): 920-36.

Stevenson, J. (2014). Internationalisation and religious inclusion in United Kingdom higher education. Higher education quarterly, 68 (1), 46-64

Stevenson, J. (2018). Muslim Students in UK Higher Education: Issues of Inequality and Inequity. London: Bridge Institute. https://www.azizfoundat…-Education-report-2.pdf

Universities UK (2022). Closing ethnicity degree awarding gaps: three years on #ClosingTheGap. London: Universities UK. https://www.universitie…-gap-three-years-on.pdf


The Impact of The Current Student Loans Regime on Muslim Student Engagement and Retention in English Higher Education


Posted by hallymk1

Back in 2022 I had the great good fortune to be asked to supervise the undergraduate Education Studies dissertation for Yusraa Maryam. Yusraa’s work focused upon the impact of the UK student loans system on the HE experience of Muslim students who see Interest-bearing loans are a barrier. In 2023 I pitched to extend this work within De Montfort University, through an Academic Innovation Project. Working with Yusraa, and Sumeya Loonat, we extended the focus to look at issues in relation to retention for the students, working in this context. Whilst Yusraa had finished her studies and was in-work, she was also employed as a research assistant on this project, with Sumeya acting as a mentor.

Below, I identify some of the emergent outcomes from this work, in relation to the following.

  1. Student-as-producer: this includes the ways in which student needs and desires for what a more enriched and inclusive higher education might look like, might be shaped actively were those with privilege inside our institutions use that privilege to create space for those made marginal to be heard. Inside institutions like universities, predicated upon prestige, status and the commodification of both knowledge and the student experience, finding strategies, spaces and times that challenge hegemony matters. This is particularly true where social and cultural narratives, in deep relations with political desires, frame particular groups as other. Work that is predicated upon values (courage, faith, justice, respect, dignity) points towards more useful modes of student agency (beyond validating institutional EDI strategies).
  2. Voice: connected to the previous point, the ability of this work to offer opportunities for students to speak their truth, and to push back against silencing, feels foundational. The students with whom we had the privilege of speaking offered a range of narratives that challenge how we view the student experience, and the ways in which we fetishise or reduce it to a particular set of characteristics.
  3. Faith: in all our talk of identity and intersectionality, it feels increasingly like Faith, and the idea of a Faith as a way of life for a way of living or a way of knowing self and the world (or self in the world), has been forgotten or ignored. This forgetting or ignoring happens in plain sight, given the ways in which those of Faith conduct and bear themselves in public. This work has taught me to challenge my own preconceptions about faith and spirituality, and carries a deep and significant connection through to indigenous ways of thinking about braiding and weaving multiple characteristics, conditions, environments, times and places into our understanding of our lives as educated and educative and educating.

Overview

Interest-bearing loans are a barrier to education for some Muslim students (Abdulrahman, 2020; Malik and Wykes, 2018). Successive UK Governments have failed to implement a funding solution supporting access and participation. Moreover, there is limited research available on the impact of this system on Muslims adhering to Islamic teachings (Avdukic, 2023). This project evaluated the impacts of interest-bearing loans on Muslim student retention in one English University. It focused on career aspirations/the perceived value of Higher Education, and to amplify their voice in the development of appropriate student services.

So, our project sits inside the following conditions.

  1. Student loans containing interest* are a barrier to education for some Muslim students, as Islam prohibits interest.
  2. There is no funding solution equivalent to the SLC that supports access and participation for impacted individuals and communities.
  3. There is limited research on the impact of this, in terms of Muslim students balancing their education and adhering to their faith.

[* riba, or loans issued for a predetermined time with the premise that they will be repaid with excess, sometimes classified as usury’]

We are mindful that there are competing fatwa and positions, in relation to this issue. Whilst Riba is prohibited in Islam, there are discussions on whether the UK student loan system falls under its definition. Most student loan systems with interest would be seen Riba-bearing, but some have a different view for the UK system (e.g. because the outstanding debt can be written off, and is only taken after earning a set amount). Then there is the necessity argument, which is separate. Since 2017, there is an argument that this has been taken advantage of to dismiss the issue, rather than look at those who do see it as an issue

Individuals feel they have a good understanding of Islamic finance, and that accruing, paying, charging or receiving interest is not permissible or at least problematic. However some Islamic scholars believe that education is important, especially where there is no alternative, so can be supported with loans. The lack of a consistent ruling causes some confusion for those making HE decisions (DfE, 2019).

Some relevant resources for this are as follows.

However, we wished to understand the experiences of a subset of those students impacted by the current student loans regime. As a result, we investigated the following questions.

  • What is the impact of interest-based student loans on Muslim students’ academic and career aspirations?
  • How does the student loans system impact how Muslim students conceptualise the value of higher education?

Maybe more Muslim girls and Muslim students would enter the uni. Like many I know try to look for alternative routes. If it was inclusive [student loan system], you’d see a lot more Muslims in the University. [Interviewee 2]

Student-as-Producer*

*We deliberately take the idea of student-as producer as a key organising concept for this project. This builds upon the work of Mike Neary, who very sadly passed away in 2022. I am currently working on a book about Mike’s practice, writing and activism. Neary (2020) asks how do revolutionary teachers teach? He asks us to consider students as activists in thinking not just about the curriculum, but the conditions inside which the classroom is reproduced. He asks us to consider students not as consumers, but in relationship with those clusters teachers, the classroom, the curriculum, the University, pedagogy, and more. He asks us to consider the relationality of the University, and how our democratic activism might reproduce a more sane set of spaces for learning and teaching than those we currently inhabit, and which reproduce our current, crisis-written, insane world.

A side point is to identify that throughout this work, Yusraa, Sumeya and I have illustrated our thinking through the work of acrylic artist Heba Zagout, who was martyred in Gaza in October 2023. Her work points us towards the hope that we might know the world otherwise.

The student-as-producer perspective builds from: first, from the Education Studies’ undergraduate dissertation of Yusraa Maryam, who has lived experience in relation to this issue; and second, the mentoring relationship between Yusraa and Sumeya Loonat, a PhD student researching institutional student support mechanisms. The project also builds connections through these students to the University Islamic Society and Prayer Room, which were pivotal in ensuring that recruitment can be managed in a trusting manner.

Crucially, this was a cross-institutional project, connecting Muslim student experiences to issues of retention. A series of semi-structured interviews with 12 current and former Muslim students, led by Yusraa with Richard, centred lived experiences. With dignity at its heart, and guided by positionality and reflexivity, the project began from the premise that institutional structures, cultures, and practices need to respond to the needs of these students, to support their retention and aspirations (Stevenson et al., 2017).

Revaluing relationality: centring voice and including Faith

The project catalysed richer understandings of how faith and academic aspirations interrelate and impact on student, family and community choices. It will lead to two briefing papers for senior leaders and programme teams, alongside a collaborative audit with the Aziz Foundation on the British Muslim First-Year Student experience, in partnership with 4 undergraduate student advisors. Here, processes, relationships and outcomes, will be produced with students as authors and activists; activists in the pedagogy that might help reimagine the University. Or at least activists in the pedagogy that might help University to engage with more voices in its reimagining.

I feel like if you’re not practicing, or if you’re not, like if you’re a non-Muslim then you won’t ever understand fully why it’s a problem. And that for us, interest is like one of the big major sins. So for you to get involved in that, it’s pretty much saying that you’re not gonna have a good afterlife. [Interviewee 1]

Back then I would go to every single guest speaker there was… because I wanted to sort of soak up that experience. And when you go through University [you] should be experiencing that more, but I’m actually experiencing that less, because I just simply can’t afford to do that anymore and so it’s sad. [Interviewee 8]

The project desired and considered the following.

  • Making clear the complexities of the student experience and of retention, in particular in relation to faith-based decisions.
  • Making clear the need to understand the impact of the extant student loans system on the retention of some Muslim students.
  • Shaping targeted interventions, like bursaries or pastoral support.

I was thinking of dropping out. So I went to my course leader.. told him that I wanted to drop out and he was like why? ‘Cause I do… enjoy my studies and when I revealed the financial situation, he got me in contact with the DMU Imam and then we spoke about possibly financing it myself. So right now I’m not on a student loan, I’m financing it myself, which is difficult, but I’m doing it. [Interviewee 8]

  • Building capacity for empathy and equity in the student experience.
  • A richer understanding of the experience of Muslim students, and to frame inclusive activities inside-and-outside the classroom.
  • By moving away from homogenising Muslim students, to understand how appropriate pastoral care might support students who wish to adhere to Islamic principles.

in second year when I started questioning, I was like but nobody really needs Muslim architects and Muslim designers, so what’s the point of me doing it? [Interviewee 2]

  • Giving Muslim students made marginal in discourse a safe space and voice to share their lived experiences, and to have their faith-based decisions recognised as valid.
  • By giving attention to issues hidden in plain sight, and that have an impact on the wider University experience and wellbeing, we can begin to shape a sense of belonging rather than further isolation.
  • The potential to develop interventions that support the full range of students, and that recognises the complexities of marginalisation.

I really didn’t want to go uni in the case of taking a student loan out, and then my parents came to conclusion that they’ll just pay it off by working, and now it’s got like my parents working like several more hours. [Interviewee 7]

  • The potential to rethink perspectives and perceptions about Muslim student engagement and experiences.
  • Helping staff in a personal tutoring context, in relation to signposting, and developing empathy and connections with their students.
  • Awareness can support with planning and timetabling of extra-curricular activities that may have an impact on student engagement.

[Taking the loan] is quite difficult and, you know, it has weighed on the conscious a lot, but, you know, it’s just… I’m kind of just in a rock and a hard place. There’s no kind of right thing to do because whatever I do, I’m compromising something else. [Interviewee 12]

I have included below a recent presentation we made up the DMU annual learning and teaching conference, on this issue. A follow-up post will detail ways in which we have begun to extend this work in partnership The Aziz Foundation, as part of their Muslim-friendly universities programme of work, through an institutional audit. In this, we are encouraging a renewed relationality within our universities, in order that we might hold space for a new way of knowing ourselves, each other and the world.

Presentation: The Impact of The Current Student Loans Regime on Muslim Student Engagement and Retention in English Higher Education

REFERENCES

Abdulrahman, M.M., (2020) ‘Higher Education Loans Board in Kenya from the Islamic Sharia Perspective’, International Journal of Islamic Thought, 18, pp. 34-42. Available at: http://journalarticle.u…18-Dec-2020_4_34-42.pdf

Avdukic, A., Khaleel, F., Abdullah, A., & Brawe, A. H. (2023). Religion as a barrier to the use of student loans for higher education: A community-based participatory study with Somalis living in England. British Educational Research Journal, 49, 370–404. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3847

The Aziz Foundation: https://www.azizfoundation.org.uk/.

Heba Zagout’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zagoutheba/?hl=en.

Malik, A. and Wykes, E. (2018) British Muslims in UK higher education. London: Bridge Institute.

Neary, M. (2020). Student as Producer: How Do Revolutionary Teachers Teach? London: Zed Books.

Stevenson, J., Demack, S., Stiell, B., Abdi, M., Ghaffar, F. and Hassan, S. (2017) The social mobility challenges faced by young Muslims. UK: Social Mobility Commission.


Beyond the Limits of Solidarity in the Post-Pandemic University


Posted by hallymk1

I have a new article out in a Special Issue of the journal, Work organisation, labour & globalisation. The Special Issue is on Organisation in the (Post)Pandemic University, and the abstract for my article, “Beyond the Limits of Solidarity in the Post-Pandemic University“, is given below.

Abstract

This article challenges a liberal analysis of higher education (HE) inside an integrated system of economic production, and instead critiques: first, how UK policymakers sought to re-engineer English HE during and after the pandemic, through governance, regulation and funding changes predicated upon accelerating a discourse of value-for-money; second, the institutional labour reorganisation that followed, and which placed complete class fractions of academic labour in a permanent state of being at risk; and third, how in continually demonstrating that it cannot fulfil the desires of those who labour within it for a meaningful work-life, the university must be transcended. In addressing the entanglement of precarity and privilege, it argues that, if the university is unable to contribute to ways of knowing, being and doing that address socio-economic, socio-environmental or intersectional ruptures, then it must go.

Citation

Hall, R. (2024). Beyond the Limits of Solidarity in the Post-Pandemic University. Special Issue: Organisation in the (Post)Pandemic University, in Work organisation, labour & globalisation. https://doi.org/10.13169/workorgalaboglob.18.1.0013


Generative AI and re-weaving a pedagogical horizon of social possibility


Posted by hallymk1

I have a new article out in the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education. It is entitled Generative AI and re-weaving a pedagogical horizon of social possibility.

This is my contribution to a Thematic Series on Higher Education Futures at the intersection of justice, hope, and educational technology (Edited by: George Veletsianos, Shandell Houlden, Jen Ross, Sakinah Alhadad, Camille Dickson-Deane). I am privileged to be engaged with this thematic series. The article is available open access here. The abstract is given below.

Abstract

This article situates the potential for intellectual work to be renewed through an enriched engagement with the relationship between indigenous protocols and artificial intelligence (AI). It situates this through a dialectical storytelling of the contradictions that emerge from the relationships between humans and capitalist technologies, played out within higher education. It argues that these have ramifications for our conceptions of AI, and its ways of knowing, doing and being within wider ecosystems. In thinking about how technology reinforces social production inside capitalist institutions like universities, the article seeks to refocus our storytelling around mass intellectuality and generative possibilities for transcending alienating social relations. In so doing, the focus shifts to the potential for weaving new protocols, from existing material and historical experiences of technology, which unfold structurally, culturally and practically within communities. At the heart of this lies the question, what does it mean to live? In a world described against polycrisis, is it possible to tell new social science fictions, as departures towards a new mode of higher learning and intellectual work that seeks to negate, abolish and transcend the world as-is?


some stuff on Palestine-Israel


Posted by hallymk1

A list of resources (mainly podcasts) that I have been engaging with, in order to work through how I feel about Palestine-Israel. I have an eye to deepening my own (self-) awareness, focusing on processing my grief and rage at our collective inhumanity, and where to place my energy. I also trying to think through what this means for my own place/sector of work, higher education, and how I might struggle with others against its complicity and silence.

Peace be with us all.

Medical Aid for Palestine: https://www.map.org.uk/

On the psychology and history of violence

‘You made me do it’ Jacqueline Rose on violence and its origins. London Review of Books, 45(23). Available: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/jacqueline-rose/you-made-me-do-it

Torrent of Rage (with Jacqueline Rose). The Alexei Sayle podcast. Available: https://audioboom.com/posts/8426930-torrent-of-rage-with-jacqueline-rose

Hamas: Past, Present, and Future. On The Nose, A Jewish Currents Podcast. Available: https://jewishcurrents.org/hamas-past-present-and-future

Understanding Seen and Unseen Violence in Israel-Palestine. The Fire These Times. Available: https://thefirethesetimes.com/2023/12/22/understanding-seen-and-unseen-violence-in-israel-palestine/

“War Is the Basis of Accumulation” – Ali Kadri on Genocide, Waste, Imperialism, and the Commodification of Death. Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. Available: https://millennialsarekillingcapitalism.libsyn.com/war-is-the-basis-of-accumulation-ali-kadri-on-genocide-waste-imperialism-and-the-commodification-of-death

On processing, composting and organising (grief)

Talking to Our Families. On The Nose, A Jewish Currents Podcast. Available: https://jewishcurrents.org/talking-to-our-families

“Turning Grief Into Defiance” Abdaljawad Omar on Resistance & Possibility in Palestine. Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. Available: https://millennialsarekillingcapitalism.libsyn.com/turning-grief-into-defiance-abdaljawad-omar-on-resistance-possibility-in-palestine

Jewish Safety Means Palestinian Liberation: Organizing In Israel-Palestine After October 7. The Fire These Times. Available: https://thefirethesetimes.com/2023/11/26/organizing-in-israel-palestine-after-october-7/

Arab Jews for Palestinian Liberation w/ Hadar Cohen and Dahab Kashi. The Fire These Times. Available: https://thefirethesetimes.com/2023/11/17/arab-jews-for-palestinian-liberation/

On (academic) labour/labor and #freepalestine

Labor’s Palestine Paradox. On The Nose, A Jewish Currents Podcast. Available: https://jewishcurrents.org/labors-palestine-paradox

Academic Freedom Lecture UJ – Robin D. G. Kelley – The Virtual Suspension of Thought. The University of Johannesburg and the Senate Academic Freedom Committee. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnxv92ELqEo

Keeping Alive Our Own Ideas of Freedom – Steven Salaita on Palestinian Resistance, Genocide and Electoralism. Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. Available: https://millennialsarekillingcapitalism.libsyn.com/keeping-alive-our-own-ideas-of-freedom-steven-salaita-on-palestinian-resistance-genocide-and-electoralism

“A Dam Against the Motion of History” – Fred Moten on Palestine & the Nation-State of Israel. Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. Available: https://millennialsarekillingcapitalism.libsyn.com/a-dam-against-the-motion-of-history-fred-moten-on-palestine-the-nation-state-of-israel


New book project: Beyond University Abolition


Posted by hallymk1

I have agreed a new book project with MayFly Books. Having worked with MayFly for my previous monograph, The Hopeless University in 2021, the ethos underpinning this publisher aligns with my own democratic and horizontal approach. I feel that the relations of production are generative and based on dialogue, and these prefigure ways of working for which we should all be struggling. I also felt very comfortable bringing my networks and communities into contact with MayFly, in order to support the open and inclusive approach of the Press. Moreover, it is important for me to bring my labour into play for radical publishers that are seeking to reimagine what academic scholarship might be, as an act of struggle.

The proposed title for the new work is: Beyond University Abolition: Imagining New Horizons for Intellectual Work with Mike Neary.

Overview

Beyond University Abolition (BUA) situates the work of UK educator, activist and scholar, Professor Mike Neary, against the traditions of indigenous, decolonial and abolitionist studies, in order to describe what lies at the horizon of University abolition, and what its transcendence might mean. Crucial in this analysis is an understanding of the contradictions between Neary’s revolutionary thinking and the intersectional, intercommunal and intergenerational realities of abolition. This has both theoretical and practical applications, and in the relationship between the concrete and the abstract, BUA will centre the idea of sublation, as an unfolding process of negating, abolishing and transcending. This brings our attention on the capitalist University into an engagement with a range of struggles that seek to transcend alienating social relations.

The book is the third in a triptych that began with an analysis of academic labour in universities of the global North, in The Alienated Academic (2018, Palgrave Macmillan). In The Hopeless University (2021, Mayfly Press), the analysis moved on to critique the political economy of those institutions. The approach in BUA will build from those analyses, to imagine intellectual activity otherwise, within a society that must negate, abolish and transcend its settler-colonial and racial-patriarchal, capitalist institutions.

The geography for Neary’s work on HE was ostensibly centred in the UK following the financial crash of 2007. BAU’s approach will bring this context into dialogue with four transnational themes.

  1. The 2010/11 struggles of students/intellectual workers in the UK, framed by the autonomist Marxist ontology of In-Against-Beyond. This highlights the material history of the Commons/co-operative praxis post-2010, in order to understand its limits in HE.
  2. Neary’s critical sociology, and practical experiments developed in common, at the intersection of: critical political economy of the University (new reading of Marx); pedagogical analyses of student-as-producer (following the Frankfurt School); revolutionary and avant-garde teaching; and, the co-operative governance of higher education.
  3. The humanism of Marx’s political economy, and in particular his philosophical and ethnographical work, centred around human becoming-in-community, as a process of sublation. This is enriched through the relational accountability of indigenous and decolonial practices, which centre respect for axiology, cosmology, ancestry, land, communities and values, and ask us to imagine the world otherwise.
  4. This communal and co-operative critique will be placed in dialogue with abolitionist praxis, in order to understand how abolitionist university studies might contribute to the generation of a new horizon for society. Wilson-Gilmore’s abolition geography points towards the liberation of space-time, realised beyond settler-colonial and racial-patriarchal institutions. This highlights the deep interconnections between institutions and social structures, like prisons, schools, universities, families, borders, and so on. Thus, abolitionist praxis offers a way of considering intellectual work beyond the alienating structures, cultures and practices of these disciplinary networks of institutions and disciplines.

This prioritises a methodology of critique, through a close reading that integrates Neary’s work with a range of abolitionist studies and practices, alongside decolonial and anti-colonial being and doing. This methodology seeks to use Neary’s work as a departure point for tracing the horizon of a society which no longer needs the University, or in which the University has been transcended through a process of sublation.


A statement from members of the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity, demonstrating their solidarity with struggles for a free Palestine


Posted by hallymk1

The undersigned Centre for Urban Research on Austerity (CURA) members, past and present, make the following statement in our personal capacities. We do so in light of recent correspondence on a Critical Geography email list from someone with links to CURA, which has a proud tradition of supporting struggles against injustice and oppression. The correspondence in question in no way reflects our views or the traditions of CURA. We recognize that these are stressful and traumatic times for members of the critical geography community and echo the sentiments of others who have emphasized the need for care, thoughtful debate, and solidarity in interactions on this forum. We likewise emphasize that trolling and harassing modes of engagement are in no way reflective of the values of CURA. The statement that follows situates the solidarity of some members of CURA with the struggles against settler-colonialism and a genocide in the making in Gaza.

A statement from members of the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity, demonstrating their solidarity with struggles for a free Palestine.


what might be done in the name of peace?


Posted by hallymk1

Perhaps the Western academic swallows their shaky voice for fear of their academic positions, careers, future salaries, and social standings. Nevertheless, there must be a greater reward for this complicity. There must be a greater sense of self-importance and collective realization. Perhaps it is a collective insistence by Western academic institutes to maintain the ‘Middle East’ at an arm’s length (or much farther) so that they can continue to study it from a distance and to plant in the geographies, bodies, and literatures of those children of darkness a utopia, a dream, an orientalist heaven. Perhaps because a liberated Palestine, a liberated Arab World, would have nothing exotic, nothing grotesque, nothing inaccessible, nothing dreamlike, nothing nightmarish, nothing pathetic, nothing victimizing, nothing criminal, nothing far-removed about it that would be worthy of study.

Thus, much of the West’s academia collapses categorically. It proves at this critical point in liberatory and decolonial history that its sole goal is to accumulate, archive, enumerate, pile, regurgitate, reproduce, and further take up space. All the while, it is granting those academics bigger paychecks, higher positions, retirement plans, and an illusory social status that the popular intellect rivals against and easily triumphs over. Its complacent and fatal silence has wholly hollowed out the term ‘decolonization’. Decolonization in those academic contexts morphs into an empty shell, a space filler, a standby trend, a conversation starter, and occasionally a means of self-congratulation. It does not attempt to interrogate white ‘humanity’ or white ‘morality’ or overall white blindness, which kills. It sits in the corner and watches until the severed Palestinian bodies have been removed, the blood cleaned, and the reports brought to the table. Then, after a long slumber, the West’s academia goes back to accumulating, archiving, enumerating, piling, regurgitating, reproducing, and further taking up space.

Sanabel Abdelrahman. Whose Humanities? Western Academia’s Persisting Complicity.

Achille Mbembe argues that Western/Northern/Capitalist academia can only reproduce ‘codified madness’, or disciplinary cultures, structures and practices that make it impossible to imagine, let alone enable, alternative stories and archives, unless they are curiosities. And for Mbembe the struggle is to demythologize this violent mundanity, and as a result, to demythologize whiteness.

Whiteness is at its best when it turns into a myth. It is the most corrosive and the most lethal when it makes us believe that it is everywhere; that everything originates from it and it has no outside.

Instead we might witness whiteness, not in its extraordinary violence as we scroll our phones over coffee, but by naming it as unfolding settler-colonial practice, or by naming settler-colonialism as the unfolding practice of whiteness. Naming a practice of zoning and enclosing for capital, ratified by the institutions of the North and their disciplines. Naming the violence of these ratifications of a particular History, alongside the archives that house its very particular endorsements.

Reproduced inside universities for impact.

The archives of ratification remind us, as Gargi Bhattacharyya simply states, that the ruling classes assemblages of extraction are proliferating. And in limiting our ways of knowing the world to the profanities housed inside those Northern archives, we enable reactionary whiteness to degrade all life for everyone. These archives are unable to label the emerging, unspeakable conditions for the degradation of not just work, but also of life. And the intellectual, University workers who tend to the archives of the North maintain their tendency to quiet acquiescence, even as a long material history of trauma unfolds through the masochism of vengeful nationalism, externalised as a terrible sadism.

These are the current, material conditions for University work. To consider whether monetising a genocide in the making, through future impact and public engagement, or to ignore it in order to reproduce value now. Or to use that impact case study or knowledge transfer or monograph or whatever as a form of cognitive dissonance and deflection and safety blanket. And this prompts a return to Eve Tuck’s asking of how shall we live?

How shall we live?

And sitting with this question makes me reconsider the material conditions and possibilities of protest and No! In all those eruptions of student protest in 2010-11, were a few of us just playing in a space that had widened, but which we couldn’t drive into fully out of fear of losing privilege and prestige? Had too few of us lost enough to find a level of mutuality with those students being kettled and batoned and taken into custody? Were we kettled by our commitment to a particular, settler-colonial archive? So, whilst we spoke about co-operative higher education and mass intellectuality and tried to build alternative forms, were these just curiosities? Just three or four-star curiosities?

I feel the qualitative difference in the emergent and insistent energy of being on demonstrations and vigils for Gaza and for ceasefire and for the return of the hostages. In vigils for murdered children and healthcare workers. In reading and hearing and holding the names of the murdered, and in remembering the dead in Gaza-Israel, we share an insistence on a new archive. An archive that refuses settler-colonial truth, built on an insistent energy that teaches me that this man-made world is unspeakable and horrific and beyond fucked-up. But it could be otherwise.

Those vigils and demonstrations remind me of the borders of the University. Because they are not taking place within the University, and there is no reason why they should, except that we want the freedom to hold them there. In those alleged bastions of liberal thought. Although we have seen that at times this cannot be tolerated, because these places are simply a representation of settler-colonial ideas and ideation. Because the prestige economy and its discipline-specific ontologies cannot tolerate them.

And this is one foundation of the problem. Our reaction to atrocity, and to the real time reporting of the slaughter of the innocents, is conditioned by our struggle for prestige as our primary motor. As if genocide in the South exists as evidence for future impact and world-leading outputs in the North. It is as if we can only organise around the unfolding of prestige and the wage and the pension, even whilst capital and its institutions reproduce a degraded idea and ideation of our prestigious, waged work.

So, we are condemned to remain trapped inside the University’s seductive promise of inclusion. And our compromise is our silence, and our living death. For Achille Mbembe in Critique of Black Reason, this ‘new fungibility, this solubility, institutionalized as a new norm of existence and expanded to the entire planet, is what I call the Becoming Black of the world’ (emphasis in the original).’

What does this Becoming Black of the world’ mean for us and our settler-colonial pedagogies and research agendas and disciplines and institutions?

How shall we live? How shall we live with ourselves?

And Ruthie Wilson-Gilmore insistently confronts us with the reality that abolition and transcendence requires that we change one thing, everything. This cannot be the safety for some of the gravitational pull of prestige and the homeliness of simply resuscitating comfortable problems. It has to be a new, mutual unfolding of a new war of ideas from within the University. A new war of ideas that reframes our work from where we have potential strength in the machine: our relationships and our pedagogies and our ways of knowing.

We cannot, we must not, carry on as if we can continue to turn the human and non-human waste of the unfolding genocide in the making into value. As value turns humans and non-humans and environments into waste.

In reminding us of this deep connection between value and waste, Ali Kadri confronts us with the valueless value of the university, whose ideas represent the class position of its top performers. And he reminds us, in the tendency towards silence around atrocities and genocides in the making, that academic ideas are the weapons that reproduce the system. And they underpin the technologies and bureaucracies and processes and chemicals and histories of a settler-colonial system that feeds off the waste of other human and non-human lives.

And what is the materiality of our ideas? The decomposing and recycling of other people’s waste, commodification and death. These are the ideas that reproduce the conditions for and relations of genocide.

How shall we live (with ourselves)?

Fred Moten reminds us of MLK’s insistence on the ‘fierce urgency of now’, which, of course, is situated inside a complex vision of the local/global in relation to matters at hand. He reminds us that this is about Gaza and not Gaza, now and not now, and that we have to inhabit these contradictions intellectually and ethically. And our work is developed in relation to a system that cannot be proportionate as it generates and feeds of human waste and the waste of human life.

And Fred Moten forces us to consider a new question: how do we give up our prestige in order to help make History? Because we cannot simply feed off it for impact. And if we can let go of our conditioning, how do we use that capacity to make History to renew anti-colonial struggle, now? Because Gaza is everywhere and everything, and we have to work from where we are.

His words quietly reveal that we don’t need the University to validate our stance against genocidal intent, even if we might want it to, so desperately. Instead it would be better if we were to realise and to accept that its colonial intent is so instilled and taken for granted that the University doesn’t care what we teach or research. Moten reminds us that the University and its system reproduces its colonial intent not in what we read and discuss, beyond culture wars, but rather in its extraction of value from our allegedly radical intent.

In our impact, and excellence, and commercialisation, and self-exploitation, and on, and on.

Yet its colonial intent is such a given that we also have leeway in the classroom and in the agendas that we set. Especially where we do this with mutuality and reciprocity as our intent. We have to talk among ourselves, as our working from where we are, in order to name and to label. Beyond the foreclosure of the discipline and the institution, our talk amongst ourselves is to build a front of struggle that takes insistent energy from the naming of the murdered and the kidnapped at vigils and on demonstrations. In the naming of the trauma, in the hope of moving with and through the trauma, we must refuse the ontological violence of our disciplines and institutions.

How shall we live? How shall we live with ourselves?

Our work must be anti-colonial. We must insist.

So, I continue to ask myself, how do I mobilise to support those who are adjunct or working on the margins or in anti-colonial (Palestinian) content? How do I demonstrate the courage to open-out the classroom so that it is anti-colonial? How do I radicalise my pedagogy such that it names and refuses genocidal intent? How do I radicalise my research such that it is clearly anti-colonial, and that it turns its gaze on that intent.

Because in this moment, teaching and learning and scholarship and research and knowledge transfer and whatever else the University does in society is meaningless if it is not about naming a genocide in the making, and asking what might be done in the name of peace.

What might be done in the name of peace, as a means of making peace? A peace in the making.

And this requires that we think about our disproportionate and asymmetrical relationship to structures, cultures and practices that reproduce ontological brutality.

And in the war of ideas this relationship cannot be built upon the colonial intent of the University. Rather, a human intent that asks, how and where might intellectual workers mobilise now? What practices do we urgently need to enact now? Because, reflecting on Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten clearly states that we have to radicalise our spaces so that we can meet this crisis rather than react. We need an urgent refocusing of attention now, to name this genocide in the making, and to work together to prepare for the brutality that will come.

Peace be with you.