Adam Levy 00:00
Hello, I’m Adam Levy, and this is Off Limits: Academia’s Taboos, a podcast from Nature Careers.
In this episode: religion.
Research and religion are often pitted against each other, discussed as if they’re inherently incompatible.
But, as we’ll learn later in the episode, religious faith is a fundamental part of many academics’ identities,
And denying this complexity can negatively impact not just the researchers themselves, but also wider society.
And the challenges can be especially severe when a researcher is from a religion.
This is the case for Maisha Islam. Maisha is a research culture lead for equality, diversity and inclusion at the University of Southampton in the UK, and she’s also a British-Bangladeshi Muslim woman.
In her work, she’s investigated the experience of others who, like her, have been made to feel like outsiders as they navigate academia.
So I talked to Maisha to find out the impacts this has had on her. She told me that even having a career in academia was at one point unthinkable to her.
Maisha Islam 01:21
So I’ve been able to do things that I didn’t even think that were possible, things I didn’t ever dream about doing, mostly because I didn’t know that was a dream I could have.
Adam Levy 01:30
Why was that, then?
Why is it that a career in academia wasn’t something that you could imagine for yourself?
Maisha Islam 01:37
I didn’t really have a connection to education when I was, you know, at school. So, you know, in the UK, we go through primary school, secondary school, GCSEs, A-levels, and it wasn’t until I did my A-level in sociology that, you know, when, like a, you know, you turn on a light and things just start clicking and making sense in your head. All of those things, all of my life experiences, started to make sense.
You know, I was constantly in classrooms where I was being told that British-Bangladeshi school children were one of the lowest achievers within education.
And also very mindful, especially in a post- 911 kind of context that, you know, Muslims are portrayed as, you know, problematic groups of people within society.
You’re all those kind of tropes about, you know, being terrorists, and the women are oppressed, and this, this and this.
And I didn’t realize that all of those things were because of structural inequality, not that there was something, you know, inherently wrong with people like me.
And so I think I just was really disassociated.
But also I didn’t feel that connection from, you know, teachers or lecturers who really saw something in me.
So if you would have told 15-year-old Maisha when she was doing her GCSEs that she’d now be a doctor, I just didn’t, wouldn’t think that that was possible, because no one really saw anything in me, and no one really extended that arm out.
People that look like me and come from other minoritized groups, we are typically not offered those opportunities in the same way.
Adam Levy 03:06
Now, once you actually began your studies, began your journey in the academic domain, have there been ways you’ve been made to feel like it’s a sphere that’s not set up for well, for people like you?
Maisha Islam 03:20
One of the challenges I think I’ve really kind of struggled with is the under-representation of, you know, people and women that look like me within higher education.
And therefore that comes with issues of visibility, but also the invisible labour that comes with, I think statistically speaking.
Minoritized people are more likely to take on board what we would call like equality, diversity and inclusion work, and a lot of that is uncompensated labour, and it’s not labor that is remunerated by progression or promotion. But I don’t typically meet, you know, Muslim women.
I’m visibly Muslim, so I wear a hijab. I don’t typically meet them, you know, within academia.
So again, it’s not finding that kind of support or the empathy from, you know, local networks that could really empathize with my lived experience.
And I’ve actually had to seek out, you know, informal mentors to help me when I’ve had some professionally tricky situations.
Adam Levy 04:15
You’re talking there about representation, especially.
I’m wondering as well whether you’ve ever had specific experiences which have alienated you from academia as a Muslim woman?
Maisha Islam 04:27
Oh, gosh, Adam, how long do we have? I mean, yeah, so when I was starting out in my career, a lot of the things that I was advocating for were for Muslim students.
So as a student, I didn’t have a proper access to prayer spaces.
As Muslims, we pray five times a day.
And so that gets really tricky if we don’t feel like we can have a space to pray on campus, you know, where we spend a majority of our time.
Lack of Halal food. So when I talk about halal food, halal just means kind of permissible within, you know, Arabic.
Being in alcohol-centric spaces, for example, were really tough.
And I actually came up with this kind of theory of satisfied settling to denote how Muslim students do not feel empowered to often voice these concerns.
And so they compromise their idea of what a good student experience is, because, you know, they’re not getting their kind of religious accommodations in.
Adam Levy 05:23
Are these kinds of issues, things that you felt comfortable and able to bring to the table to make your colleagues and your institution more aware of what you’re going through?
Maisha Islam 05:33
Yes, I wouldn’t say bringing the topics to the table is difficult. That is genuinely what I do through my research on my work.
What’s the problem is that we’re not invited to the table to even discuss these issues. Or when we do discuss these issues, and we raise it through formal committee meetings and channels, and all the bureaucracy that UK universities go through, we’re not often involved or consulted meaningfully in those processes.
And it feels really isolating, and it’s very risky, constantly raising these systemic issues, because it’s very obvious where the like, quote, unquote, dissent is coming from.
We almost put a target on our backs for having advocated for them in the first place. We are constantly pushing at closed doors sometimes.
Adam Levy 06:19
Have you ever experienced moments, say, in interactions with colleagues, which have made you feel unwelcome in academia?
Maisha Islam 06:28
A lot of the times these are microaggressive, covert, you know, actions that happen that you can’t necessarily put your finger on, like ”That was racism, that was Islamophobic.”
But you feel it. You feel it in your bones of what the action or the intention kind of was.
It really comes through with this feeling of, for me, I feel like I need to be perfect all the time, because I’m very conscious of how precarious my position as a visibly Muslim British-Bangladeshi woman is.
And we hear this from Muslim academics in the literature as well. You know, we’re never assumed to be the lecturer. You know, within academic context, we’ve had multiple women say how they are always misidentified as students and rather than like a lecturer or academic teaching staff.
Adam Levy 07:16
Now, as you’ve continued in your career in academia, have you been able to build up something of a support network of other people who’ve had similar experiences?
Maisha Islam 07:27
Yep, definitely. As I’m kind of progressing on with my career, I’m finding more and more women as I become more connected within UK higher wducation.
But I completed my PhD last year. And the subject of my doctoral research was looking at British Bangladeshi women within higher education, British Bangladeshi women who were specifically PhD students within higher education.
Whilst I got to the end of my data collection, I realized I now have access to 10 women who don’t know one another and who don’t know other women like us.
Why don’t we all get together and, you know, form our own, you know, organic network?
It’s, it’s lovely having those women who just really intimately understand our lived experience. That we don’t need to, you know, constantly go through the time or the effort to retell our experiences of isolation.
Or why when something happens, that it is either sexist or Islamophobic or racist, is just an untold level of understanding that that we have as women together
Adam Levy 08:33
And in your doctoral research, did you find that your personal experiences were shared by the other women in academia who you spoke with?
Maisha Islam 08:41
Yes, that was very much reiterated through my doctoral research.
So those feelings of under-representation, invisibility and invisible kind of labor, intersectionality and how that impacts your academic identity formation.
And lastly, just inherent Islamophobia and discrimination within our spaces.
There’s the UK universities that we speak and work in.
And when we talk about these kinds of inequalities, they do happen on, kind of two main grounds.
So the first is academically, so when we talk about research and knowledge production, but also institutionally, you know, the policies and the practices that suppress us from voicing and changing the kind of system within.
So yes, a lot of these themes did come up in my doctoral research, and I think we are witnessing a lot of what I’m saying in live time now in UK universities.
Adam Levy 09:32
What would you like to see actually change within academia to better support not just religious minorities but people in general, who have been underrepresented or face boundaries within academia?
Maisha Islam 09:46
I think where we’re finding ourselves at a bind is we have the Office for Students, who are the regulator of English higher education, saying things like, ”We need to protect freedom of speech,” which I fundamentally agree with.
But they’re not necessarily being clear on how that extends to hate speech, for example.
I also think our policies and procedures need to be better in recognizing that there is an under representation of people that look like me within spaces, within our academic spaces, within our professional staff spaces. Aand get the data. Really see where it’s going wrong.
And how can we, again, go along those lines to start redressing some of those inequalities.
And, importantly, bring, you know, people that look like me, racially minoritized, Muslim women, Muslim academics, to the table. Think about how much more we could be doing to encourage that kind of level of representation.
I ultimately believe that, you know, the point of racism, Islamophobia, discrimination, any kind of ism, you know, transphobia, all of these things, they are just patterns of exclusions that we see from academics that have come before me and who will come after me.
But I think there are steps that we could take, like some of the things I’ve just mentioned, that would ensure we could at least start making more meaningful progress.
Adam Levy 11:09
That was my Maisha Islam.
As Maisha mentioned, events centering around alcohol can be especially difficult for Muslims navigating academia.
But of course, this doesn’t just impact Muslims.
And in the next episode, we’ll look at the stigma around alcohol dependency among researchers.
But now I wanted to find out just how accurate or otherwise assumptions around religion and research actually are.
And Elaine Howard Ecklund has researched exactly that.
She is a sociologist at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where she also directs the Boniuk Institute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance.
Elaine published a book in 2019 titled Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around The World Really Think About Religion.
And so I wanted to tease apart exactly why we talk about science and religion as if they’re polar opposites.
Elaine Howard Ecklund 12:07
So we do talk about them is as if they’re polar opposites.
And I think that’s why it’s really important to bring the social sciences in here and where we can actually study people.
Our team at Rice University has studied scientists in eight different national contexts.
And in the US, about 50% of scientists at universities identify as being part of a religious tradition.
In the UK, it goes down significantly to less than 20%
Adam Levy 12:41
Now to some, these numbers might actually seem quite high.
Especially if people do think of science and religion as somehow mutually exclusive.
Is there some reason there’s this discrepancy, maybe, between expectation and reality?
Elaine Howard Ecklund 12:56
So I’ve been really fortunate to also study what the religious public thinks about science, particularly in the US.
And there is the sense that while people actually think very highly of science, and all of the things especially that medical science can do for us in caring for our bodies.
They think that scientists sometimes are not trustworthy, that scientists tend to be irreligious, that all scientists are atheists.
So you’re exactly right. There is a widespread public perception that scientists are not for religious people.
And I think that that’s in part because of the popular writing that’s been done.
So in the early 2000s there was a lot of writing arguing that, you know, scientists should not be religious, that they usually weren’t religious, that religion and science are completely opposed to one another.
And when writing is popular and widespread, then there’s also the sense that there’s a very large group of people who have those attitudes, and that may not be the case.
Adam Levy 14:09
What about, then, the impact on those religious scientists themselves? Is there a sense in which this perception affects how they behave and how they disclose and talk about their faith?
Elaine Howard Ecklund 14:22
Religious scientists do feel like they have to hide their faith often.
That’s another reason, I think, that the idea in the scientific community, that there aren’t very many religious scientists are perpetuated.
Scientists may be religious, but they just feel like they can’t talk about it because very negative public things are often said within the scientific community itself.
So, then, a culture of separation really creeps into the scientific community, especially in university science itself.
People who want to go into academic science may feel like they can’t. They may feel like it’s quite irreligious, or even anti-religious.
And when scientists are personally religious and hold their religions to be very important to themselves, then they sometimes feel like science is not the right place for them, even if they start a degree in science.
Adam Levy 15:15
Now we’re speaking, kind of about religion across the board here. Does this particularly affect people, say, of minority religions in countries?
Elaine Howard Ecklund 15:24
We found that in the United Kingdom broadly, but in England in particular, where there are the most research universities in the UK, that Muslim scientists had a particularly difficult time, that they did not feel like they could go into science, that they felt, sometimes not very welcome.
And I think some of their ideas about how Muslim scientists, that is, some of Muslim scientists’ ideas about how they will be treated in science, are kind of accurate.
We did find stereotyping among the science community, especially at research universities and top research universities. Concerns about Islam, concerns that the tenants of Islamic faith would not allow scientists who are Muslim to check their experiments or repeat experiments.
We did not find that these concerns were valid when we interviewed and surveyed Muslim scientists themselves. But there still is that culture of fear in the scientific community when it comes to Muslim scientists.
In the US, on the other hand, there are those same sorts of attitudes towards evangelical Christian scientists, and so that’s those kind of attitudes, even if they’re not actually based in truth.
So chances are that if you have a Muslim or an evangelical christian scientist who has gone all the way through the PhD that they have figured out how to hold these things, their scientific work and their faith intention or ways in which to make them compatible, that these issues that the broader scientific community is fearful of, are probably not founded.
Adam Levy 17:09
I’m curious what actually brought you personally to this area of research. Is this a topic that’s particularly close to your heart, or is it something you kind of stumbled towards in your career?
Elaine Howard Ecklund 17:20
So both are true. So I have always loved science. I was that kid that entered all of the science fairs. I was raised in a farming community in a rural part of the United States, and so I loved the natural world and the outdoors.
When you’re that near to it, you do start to really appreciate and value the beauty of nature. And I also was raised in a fairly conservative religious community that did not affirm higher education and did not affirm science.
And so I was so fortunate that I went to a university. I did my work at Cornell University in New York state.
There was very much a sense among groups of religious people on campus that these things could be very compatible.
From the academic side, I’ve always been interested in how competing ideas are actually lived out in real, everyday people’s lives as a kind of sociological question.
Sociologists study group behaviour. Scientists seem to have stereotypes about religious people, and religious people have stereotypes about scientists.
And I started thinking, ”Gosh, empirical data might be the answer here. Let’s look at the data and see what’s really going on in these communities, because their negative interaction with one another has a lot of consequences.”
And we saw in the US that it had, sadly, very deadly consequences when it came to resistance to vaccination during the pandemic.
And so I thought, wow, this is a chance to make a real difference in the world by bringing some empirical data to what has been in the past a very heated debate
Adam Levy 18:58
With everything you understand about how religion is viewed within science and how religious scientists feel about navigating their academic domain, what’s your hope for how we could shift academia in the future?
Elaine Howard Ecklund 19:13
I would love for academic scientists to recognize that religious scientists can be good scientists, to break down some of their own stereotypes, and to see religion as just one of those identities that sits along other sides, other identities, like one’s social class and background.
And we need those kind of community connections sometimes to do good scientific work and to remain in a profession that can be very difficult.
And so if a scientific community doesn’t recognize that, then sadly, it’s potentially pushing away talent, because people’s religious identities are often related to other kinds of identities, gender and race and ethnicity and national context.
And we want people to bring their whole selves to their work and to their scientific work, which I think that will make them do better work.
Adam Levy 20:08
Elaine Howard Ecklund there, our last interviewee of today’s episode.
But as I mentioned in our next episode, we’ll be looking at an issue that affects many in academia, but that few feel able to talk about. Alcohol dependency,
Speaker 4 20:24
The stigma is a massive barrier to help-seeking. Who would want to admit that they were out of control?
Adam Levy 20:33
Until then, this has been Off Limits: Academia’s Taboos, a podcast from Nature Careers.
Thanks for listening. I’m Adam Levy.
