I am guilty for not updating this blog, but my written work have been appearing elsewhere! Among them include an article in Signs journal, something I’ve been working on the past few years on unveiling and non-veiling practices among Malay-Muslim women and their reconstruction of self and identity. Another article is now published in Kajian Malaysia on the emotional reality of doing freelance and fixed-term academic work and strategies of mobilising the academic precariat.
Abstract for ‘”Free hair”: Narratives of Unveiling and the Reconstruction of Self’ in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 44, no. 1 (Autumn 2018): 155-176
Voluntary unveiling by Muslim women has largely been overlooked within the context of Islamization. In Muslim-majority societies where the hijab is not legally imposed on women, Muslim women who do not veil or are “free hair” face significant pressure as they embody, in very visible terms, deviance from normative Islamic practice. This article seeks to decenter the symbol of the hijab as the defining factor of these women’s lives by examining why Malay Muslim women remove the hijab and by reanimating a discussion on agency, failure, and reconstruction of self enacted through the practice of nonveiling. It examines the practices of the self that depart from local iterations of normative femininity and the processes of Islamization in Malaysia and how such processes inadvertently produce critical subjectivities and resistant bodies.
‘Precarious Intellectuals: The Freelance Academic in Malaysian Higher Education’, in Kajian Malaysia Vol. 36, No. 2, 1–20
What is the impact of the rising class of the academic precariat – defined as
academic workers contracted to teach and conduct research on short-term, zerohour contracts – on Malaysia’s rapid industrialisation of higher education? This article seeks to illuminate the employment pattern of this growing class of insecure academic labour at a time when there is a decline in tenured appointments and academic positions for new PhD graduates in Malaysia. The work environment of the academic precariat is characterised as flexible at best and exploitative at worst; an average academic precariat may experience a drop in wages commensurable with their qualification and experience, lack of employment benefits and office hours, and “docility” under the disciplinary management of a neoliberal institution. This article also seeks a sensitive reading of how freelance academics understand themselves by highlighting their affective or emotional labour and whose experiences are specifically shaped by insecurity, vulnerability and uncertainty. Taking a sociological approach to examining this phenomenon, this article argues that the rise of the academic precariat can be attributed to the discursive climate within and at the peripheries of Malaysian higher education that operates alongside the restructuring of funds into higher institutions of learning. Such a discursive climate surrounds the unstable semantic reproduction of the designation “academic” and its catch-all usage to describe individuals within and at the peripheries of academia. Arguing that the rise of the academic precariat is a bleak indication of the state of higher education in Malaysia, this article closes with strategies for mobilising resistance and marshalling support through the strengthening of unions for full-time, part-time and freelance academics.
I’ve also been lucky to review Andrew Weintraub and Bart Barendregt’s super fascinating edited volume, Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities for the Dutch Southeast Asian Studies journal, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde.
Alicia Izharuddin 