Call for Papers

2026-04-09

Special Issue

Navigating Muslimhood: Community, Context, and Becoming

Editor: Dr. Shemine Gulamhusein

This special issue invites scholars, practitioners, and community knowledge holders to explore Navigating Muslimhood as a lived, relational, and continually unfolding practice. Rather than treating Muslimhood as a fixed identity or bounded category, we are interested in how Muslim communities themselves understand navigation as movement, negotiation, refusal, creativity, care, and world-making across shifting social, political, spiritual, and everyday terrains. Navigating Muslimhood is not only about responding to constraint, surveillance, or marginalization; it is also about joy, intimacy, contradiction, humour, rest, and the quiet work of belonging.

Community understandings of Navigating Muslimhood often emerge at intersections such as where fatih meets feeling, where public scrutiny collides with private devotion, where inherited traditions are re-worked through contemporary lives, and where everyday practices like sport, dress, or art become sites of negotiation, expression, and care. These intersections are not linear or hierarchical; they form patterns that change across time, place, generation, and circumstances. This special issue foregrounds Muslim-led meaning-making and invites contributions that attend to how navigation is shaped through relationships to land, bodies, movement, memory, creativity, and care.

We welcome work that engages with, but is not limited to, the following nodes of intersection:

  • Recreation, Leisure and Movement: sport, walking, swimming, play, rest, travel, and everyday leisure as sites where Muslimhood is negotiated, policed, reclaimed, or quietly lived.
  • Art, Aesthetics and Creative Practice: poetry, visual art, music, storytelling, digital media, fashion, and craft as methods of sense-making, resistance, devotion, and joy.
  • Migration, Displacement and Home-Making: navigating Muslimhood across borders, diasporas, refugee journeys, settler-colonial contexts, and intergenerational memory.
  • Bodies, Health and Care: illness, disability, mental health, grief, healing practices, and the embodied labour of surviving and caring within Muslim worlds.
  • Youth and Aging: how Muslimhood is navigated differently across the life course, including childhood, adolescence, elderhood, and transitions between them.
  • Gender and Social Worlds: navigating Muslimhood through diverse gendered experiences, kinship formations, family life, and the negotiation of belonging, care, and identity.
  • Surveillance and Safety: visibility, Islamophobia, securitization, risk, and the everyday strategies of protection, camouflage, and assertion.
  • Spirituality, Ethics, and Faith: prayer, doubt, ritual, moral reasoning, everyday piety, and the ways faith is practiced beyond formal institutions.
  • Land and Place: relationships to land, water and skies, climate grief, environmental stewardship, and Indigenous-Muslim entanglements.
  • Joy, Pleasure and Ordinary Life: laughter, friendship, food, celebration, rest, and the insistence that Muslim life is more than a reaction to harm.

Taken together, this special issue understands Navigating Muslimhood as an active, creative, and collective practice that refuses singular stories and instead attends to the textured ways Muslim communities move through the world, make meaning, and imagine otherwise.

Submission Process

Please submit an abstract (max 250 words) outlining your proposed contribution. Contributors to the special issue will be asked to participate in a reciprocal peer review process by reviewing one other submission, supporting a collaborative and community-engaged approach to scholarship.

Timeline

  • April 10, 2026 – Call for papers released
  • May 15, 2026 – Abstract submissions due (please submit to shemineg@uvic.ca)
  • May 30, 2026 – Abstract decisions returned
  • August 1, 2026 – Full articles due
  • August 2026 – Peer review process
  • September-Mid-October 2026 – Revisions and final decisions
  • December 2026 – Publication of special issue

If you have any questions, please get in touch with the special issue editor, Dr. Shemine Gulamhusein via email (shemineg@uvic.ca).