Qudra Goodall

I am an ESRC funded PhD candidate and Associate Tutor at The University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich, UK. 

I have a BA Honours in International Politics and Modern Languages (University of Aberystwyth, Wales), and a Research Masters in Social Sciences Research Methods (UEA, International Development), producing an ethnographic study on belonging and everyday lived religion for a group of British Sufi Muslim women.

I am part of the collaborative and interdisciplinary RCUK- funded British Muslim Values Project (UEA/BBC). Producing a film exploring second-generation British convert Muslim women’s perspectives on the compatibility between ‘British’ and ‘Islamic’ values and publications including; autoethnography in collaborative research and digital storytelling.

My PhD thesis, ‘The Journeying Self’ – An ethnography of ethics and change amongst young British-born Muslim women in Norfolk, approaches the concept of self-formation through a liminal positionality, whereby the children of convert Muslims (CCM), born and brought up in the UK, inhabit multiple cultures and identities. My analysis addresses generational change and how, despite the parents’ active and conscious choice to have transcended or ruptured from their socio-cultural and political past, their children - without a similar conviction of change - have had to deconstruct those inherited discourses and “decolonise” them; meaning the process of understanding how deeply those parental and community ways became ingrained in their lives; their ideas of work, marriage, and childrearing. Through embodied and subjective experiences, CCM narrate a processual journey - the ‘arc of subjectivisation’- challenging the concepts of Britishness and Muslimness, secularity and religion, submission and resistance, through domains of family and community, gender justice, to the creation of new forms of representation and faith practice, broadening dialogue and the possibilities for social and ethical change. Thereby unearthing often ambivalent accounts of subjectivity, ethics, self realisation and modes of agency and how through a process of provoking social norms that constrain identities CCM discover their capacity to live and act.