Prof Nuraan Davids from the Department of Education Policy Studies in the Faculty of Education is the recipient of a prestigious fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University in America.

She received the fellowship for her excellent work on democratic citizenship education and Islamic philosophy of education, especially her efforts to place these two aspects in conversation with each other. Through her numerous publications, she has insisted on putting into play a different kind of deliberation – one which shifts away from dichotomous understandings of what is construed as 'Western liberalism' and 'Islamic philosophy'.

Davids says she is immensely humbled at being included, and proud and excited to engage with an amazing group of fellows from other parts of the world.

“I see this opportunity as one of profound privilege, and a tremendous responsibility not only to continue to push myself, but to give back to my students through my teaching, supervision and mentoring.

This fellowship will allow me to interact within and with very different spaces, voices and perspectives. I expect to have my own understandings challenged and disrupted."

“I am confident that this opportunity will not only benefit me in my own scholarship, but in assisting my students in their own thinking and analysis. Certainly, the underlying challenge is what I do with my scholarship in advancing socially just societies and engagements," adds Davids.

She plans to spend her fellowship year working on a book project entitled 'The Subaltern Revisited: Interrogating Notions of (Re)-representation' in which she will focus on, among others, issues of race, gender, religion, culture, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and migrations. The project has a specific interest in Muslim women, who, for many unexplored reasons, occupy realms of subjectification and objectification of being represented without representation.

Davids says although the project is focused on the representivity of Muslim women in liberal democracies, she will also explore other aspects which will include the role and responsibility of a university in a democracy, debates and controversies surrounding marginalised groups, identity construction, unpacking conceptions of the 'subaltern', represensitivity and presence, and implications for democratic citizenship education, as well as cosmopolitan education.

The fellowship will commence virtually as of 1 September, with the hope that all fellows take up residency by January 2021. They have already started with a few preliminary sessions.