Education

I think for a long time for me I was so obsessed with doing a good job, and having people tell me I was doing a good job at work, [inhales] that I totally missed the fact that like I didn't have a sense of purpose and so figuring out how to say “no” has been a really huge thing. Having a baby has been a really huge thing, but… coming with some parameters or boundaries for myself. I used to say “yes”  to every writing opportunity because I just wanted to get my writing out there and any chance to get published I'd say “yes.” Now I ask myself okay… does it have to do with education? Does it benefit women? Or does it have to do with like illuminating a cool cultural element of Worcester? And if the answer to those is “no” all three of them, then I say, “No I can't do it.”

I think that one-dimensional stories are problematic, so I think a good story is a story that is multidimensional, that looks at a person’s lived experience in totality, not just one part of their identity. Like if you were just to look at my experience as a woman, it would be inadequate because one’s lived experience is intersectional. I am a woman who is brown who covers–who is identifiable as Muslim, who is American, who has done a doctorate, who has three kids… so there’s many layers to our lived experiences and I think that’s really important. A lot of the work that I do in my research is around counter-narratives, and I believe that counter-narratives are really important because a lot of times people are like, “If you don’t tell your story, no one will tell your story. Your story won’t be told,” and that’s actually not true. If you don’t tell your story, someone else will. And that’s deeply problematic because when someone else tells your story, it is a hijacked story. It’s telling from their perspective. And in many cases, the stories of minoritized people are whitewashed to fit particular stereotypes or angles, and that’s why I think counter-narratives for minoritized populations are really important and that’s my commitment to the work that I do, is to make sure that those counter-narratives are out there and they’re heard, because we have to tell our own stories, you know, because that’s where the truth lies.

I have been very lucky that opportunities have presented themselves to me and I have taken them and that has kind of created my path. And it started when I was hired to be the Study Abroad Advisor and Assistant Director of International Programs at Clark University. And in part I was attracted to that job because I'm a first generation American, I had grandparents that lived in Germany, I had visited them. So I had some international experience. And I think I had an affinity for that experience of being new in a place. So, I was hired for that job, and I realized that what I liked the most about that was the communication part, the writing. So, I would write booklets for each of the different study abroad programs in each different country and the customs, what to expect, how to prepare yourself. And so then I left when I had my daughter. And then when she was a little bit older, I took a job at the Higgins Armory Museum. It started out as a staff writing position, and then it evolved into a public relations position. And so that is where I really learned that I love that, I love telling stories. And that's really what public relations is. It's telling stories, and trying to get those stories placed in various outlets so that there's a broad audience for that. That's really what it is.

Don’t give up who you are to try to please somebody else.

I think that it’s such a great learning experience for me to be interacting with people of your generation and I love teaching.  I teach writing history, I teach U.S history, I teach women’s history and I’m very passionate about my subject matter.  I love my students, I love my subject matter, and my dissertation which is the other element of my job at Clark.  I’m writing an intellectual and cultural biography of a woman who was a 19th century reformer who spent time in Boston and in Worcester which is really cool and I didn’t realize how many synergies there would be when I started working on this project.  But I’m very passionate about that and the things that she tried to accomplish for women that really have been swept under the rug because no one has really ever heard of her. Her name is Caroline Dall.  So, she’s a real character. She really believed that women needed to be empowered to work even more importantly than they needed to be empowered to vote and so she spent a lot of time trying to find ways for women to become professionals in a lot of industries and ways for working-class women to have more fulfilling work themselves. She’s really an interesting character.