Technical summary

I begin with this technical summary to clearly outline the structure of my fieldwork and analysis to the reader. This sets up an overview of the mechanics of this research project: from here, the rest of the chapter is used to expand on the logic and ethics behind these technical decisions.

21 Black Muslim women (aged 18-51) in Manchester and Sheffield participated in this research project from July 2014 to September 2016 (see Table 1). During participant recruitment, I (mostly) left it to potential participants to self-identify as Black, Muslim and a woman living in Manchester or Sheffield. In line with this, I contacted a number of specific sites that Black Muslim women might engage with that were based in Manchester and Sheffield: I put up flyers at Afro-Caribbean hair salons, shops (marketing themselves as) selling Muslim clothing, local mosques and university prayer rooms (for an example of the poster, see Appendix A). I went to play groups for children of African heritage, Afro-Caribbean, BME and Islamic university societies, and Muslim women’s study groups. I also posted online calls for participants on Facebook groups targeted at Muslim, Black and/or BME communities in Manchester and Sheffield.

Once contact with some participants was achieved, I used snowball sampling to recruit other Black Muslim women. Snowballing was useful in this project because I was not focused on participants as a representative sample of a wider population: rather, I was looking to highlight different narratives within experiences of being a Black Muslim woman. This was also the guiding principle behind my decision to stop recruiting participants after working with 21 Black Muslim women: it was at this point in time where I began to notice how a number of themes were repeated across participants’ narratives.

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Table 1: Participant details Pseudonym Age City Interview

locations Heritage Regular headscarf wearer

Regular abaya wearer

Aaliyah 25 Sheffield Café Somali Yes Yes

Aneesa 24 Sheffield Participant

home

Somali Yes No

Aqua 18 Sheffield Participant

home

Somali Yes No

Asiya 23 Sheffield Café &

University prayer room

Somali Yes Yes

Babs 26 Manchester Café Sudanese Yes No

Cookie 28 Sheffield Participant

home Nigerian Yes No Fatima Mohamed 42 Manchester Participant home Somali Yes No

Halima 18 Manchester Participant

home & College

Nigerian Yes No

Hind 26 Manchester Café Sudanese No No

Khadijah 24 Sheffield Participant

home

Somali Yes No

Laila 25 Manchester Café Sudanese Yes No

Liala 48 Sheffield Participant

home

Somali Yes Yes

Mimi 27 Sheffield Participant

home

Somali Yes No

Mistura 51 Manchester Participant

home

Nigerian Yes Yes

Sahra Hassan

19 Sheffield Café Somali Yes Yes

Sally 18 Sheffield Participant

home

Somali Yes No

Salma 40 Manchester Café Sudanese Yes No

Sam 18 Sheffield Participant

home Somali Yes No Umm Kareema 51 Sheffield Participant workplace

Jamaican Yes Yes

Umm Yusuf 28 Manchester Participant

home

Nigerian Yes Yes

Zainab 21 Sheffield University

prayer room & café

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I decided to use a mixed-methods qualitative approach: this was designed to tease out different knowledges with participants (Meth and McClymont, 2009).6 _{This involved}

two interviews (based on Black feminist understandings of dialogue) and a clothes journal (see table 2). Each semi-structured interview was at least one hour long: this was audio-recorded and later transcribed.7 _{Before Interview 1, participants were sent}

an information sheet (see Appendix B) and a consent form (see Appendix C) which we discussed before the recorder was turned on at our first interview. Interviewees were asked to choose their own pseudonym, and all contact information, clothes journals, interview recordings, and transcripts were labelled with that name.8

Table 2: Interview structure Interview 1  Personal background

Clothes Journal  Record of clothes worn over a minimum of four-day period

Interview 2  Experience of clothes journal

 Discussion of clothes worn through clothes journal  Experience of interview process overall

Interview 1 was used to ask general questions about their personal background including what they liked to wear across a number of different spaces, what they used to wear as children, and how this might have altered as they grew older. Following this, participants received daily prompts from me that reminded them to tell me all of the different clothes they wore (and where they wore them) over (a minimum of) a four- day period (for examples of this, see Appendices D and E). Each day, participants recorded their clothing practices and movements in a makeshift clothes journal (i.e. via WhatsApp, sms or email).9 _{Interview 2 was then used to ask questions about the}

different clothes shared through the clothes journal. It was also an opportunity to ask any follow-up questions that either of us had from Interview 1. At the end of interview 2, both of us reflected on the interview process and discussed different things that had been learnt through our conversations.

It was important to analyse the interview transcripts and clothes journals in a manner that highlighted how Black Muslim women built understandings of our beings through different clothing practices. To do this, I used a cross between narrative and critical discourse analysis: Souto-Manning (2014) refers to this as critical narrative analysis. By using critical narrative analysis, everyday narratives (built with participants)

6 _{Using complimentary qualitative methods is also illustrated through related literature, particularly}

with Hamzeh (2011) who used participant observations, focus groups and individual interviews to explore the construction of the hijab.

7 _{The only exception to this was Umm Kareema who did not want to be recorded but was happy for}

me to write up notes following our interactions.

8 _{The only information that stated their given names was on the consent form (see Appendix C):}

these forms were stored in a locked drawer.

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anchored the analysis of the larger discourses at play as Black Muslim women

negotiated their beings across different spaces. Journals and interview transcripts were coded with the use of NVivo, starting with more descriptive codes that were then re- worked to highlight discursive themes (Berg, 2007; Bryman, 2012; Crang, 2005; Silverman, 2010).

As was stated at the beginning of this section, this is an overview of the decisions made when conducting research with Black Muslim women for this project. These were not easy or straightforward decisions to make: the deeply reflexive nature of this project and its anchoring within Black feminist ethics and epistemology meant that each of these decisions had to be carefully interrogated (as will become evident through the rest of this chapter). Before I expand on these technical decisions, I set up the ethical concerns that I confronted as part of the foundation of my methodology.