Theologian Hussein Rashid discusses the challenges and possibilities he sees in environmental justice work today.
When former Barnard adjunct professor Hussein Rashid, CC ’96, first came to Columbia, he navigated his way through his undergraduate years as a first-generation low-income student with some difficulty. Twenty years later, when he returned as an adjunct professor of religion, he also took on an informal advising role in order to pass on his knowledge to students at Barnard.
“I’d talk to students about being a student of color when I was in school versus what it’s like now, what it’s like being a Muslim on campus, what it’s like being first generation and being on a lot of financial aid and still being conscious of class, as they themselves try to navigate that space,” Rashid said.
Rashid is just one of Barnard’s many adjunct faculty members who have been making an active effort to facilitate conversations surrounding diversity, inclusivity, and equity in the classroom.
Muslim Girlhood, Past and Present: A Conversation with Shenila Khoja-Moolji – BLARB.
HUSSEIN RASHID: Why did you decide to write a book about Muslim girls and their education? And why Muslim South Asia? SHENILA
KHOJA-MOOLJI: I had been researching and writing about the convergence on the figure of the girl in international development policy and practice for some time. I noticed that many development campaigns portray girls in the Global South as not only threatened by poverty, disease, and terrorism, but also as holding the potential to resolve these problems.
Hussein reflected a bit on human rights as that which we owe one another but “from a faith perspective, human dignity is vouchsafed by the divine, it is something is inherent and promised to us, over which we have no agency except to forget that we have it. And that’s an important way to think through, ‘How do we assure dignity?'”
Appreciating the expertise that farmworkers brought to creating the Fair Food Program’s human rights solution and how important it is to resist challenges to such expertise Hussein continued, “People say ‘who are you to say what it is that you need? How do you know what you need when you haven’t studied it?’ These are questions of performance that take away from human dignity. As a child of immigrants, as a person of color, as a Muslim in this country, I know that these goal posts are always moving. I have got a bachelor’s degree and three graduate degrees from Harvard and it’s not good enough.”
Hussein