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    Becoming a ‘good’ Muslim woman : comparing habitus and everyday lived religiosity : an ethnographic study of Aotearoa New Zealand Muslim women : a dissertation presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Social Anthropology at Massey University, Palmerston North, Manawatu, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2023-11-10) Cheema, Hina Tabassum
    For women like us Every day isn’t about a sunrise Every night isn’t about a sunset Between our sunrise and sunset There are puzzles to solve Of the pictures never seen before Missing and broken pieces And bits mixed up from other puzzles But surprisingly Sometimes we make them And other times, they break us And occasionally They are left unsolved Lingering in on our minds Becoming part of us This thesis is an ethnographic study of everyday lived experiences of Muslim women immigrants in Aotearoa New Zealand. Through a focus on everyday lived religiosity, I explore the lives of Muslim women, who are extremely diverse and in the state of becoming as depicted in the poem. I extend Bourdieu’s theory of Habitus by introducing Comparing Habitus as an analytical tool which allows us to comprehend and analyse the diversity, multiplicity, complexity, intersubjectivity, heterogeneity, fluidity and unfinishedness of Muslim women’s lived experiences in Aotearoa NZ. I also use Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming and Das’s theory of everyday to understand the complex and intersubjective ways of becoming ‘good’ Muslim women and their negotiations of everyday challenges in a non-Muslim context. I use the framework of lived religion to capture my participants' experiences to understand these experiences as ordinary Muslims; e.g., what Muslims do rather than what Islam says. The use of poetry and autoethnographic commentaries throughout the thesis adds another layer to the analysis to confer insights and to help understand my participants’ experiences in more depth. The study concludes that being a Muslim woman immigrant in Aotearoa NZ is an ongoing agentive and complex process that is continuously defined and redefined, not always in a linear direction. Muslim women make sense of their lives through engagement with other Muslim women and use comparison as one of the key strategies to make everyday decisions. My research participants are on journeys to understand Islam more logically, using their agency to actively negotiate situations, and are constantly engaged in finding meaning in their lives. The study suggests the need to understand Muslim women as cultural and social beings who actively negotiate their everyday challenges.
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    Media consumption in contemporary urban Indonesia and everyday life : Muslim women, parenting and media : research portfolio of Hanny Savitri Hartono collated for examination for PhD (posthumously) by supervisors
    (Massey University, 2017) Hartono, Hanny Savitri
    Since the fall of the New Order regime in 1998, the Indonesian media landscape has been radically transformed. The country is now a densely saturated media space in which people are exposed to numerous media from television programming to social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Although Indonesia is the country with the highest Muslim populace in the world, its media do not necessarily reflect the growing resurgence of Islamism in the region. With heavy media exposure, which is mainly secular, Muslim women, consciously or not, seek to negotiate the media they are exposed to in the context of their everyday lives within the frame of their Islamic understanding. As media become increasingly contested, their engagement with media becomes more critical. This thesis explores the centrality of Muslim parenting and media in the everyday lives of Muslim mothers in Semarang and Jakarta and seeks to unravel the meanings of media and their strategies for dealing with these media. The focus is on Muslim women and mothers and their negotiations with media around them and how their parenting and Muslim-ness are not merely influenced by the media they use but also impact the media they embrace. In the process, they too are struggling to mediate the media around their children. Hence, reflexive media engagement takes centre stage. In this research, I combine ethnographic fieldwork in Semarang, Central Java and online discussions on a closed Facebook group of which participants mostly reside in Jakarta. Through in-depth interviews, diary studies, conversations, online discussions, field notes and other pertinent resources, I delve into the ways in which Muslim women and their children deal with television, especially celebrity gossip shows, and children’s programming, social media particularly Facebook, and billboards. By considering the notions of agency and piety through the lens of Islamic tenets, and the particularities of Muslim women in Semarang and Jakarta, this study takes a close look at the daily dealings with media of urban mothers. The discussion falls into four main topics: an investigation of the experiences of Muslim mothers who are exposed to television gossip shows and how they negotiate these programmes in terms of their understanding of the Islamic prohibition of gossip; an examination on how Muslim women are actively shaping piety through Facebook in the midst of the debate surrounding its use by Muslim clerics; an investigation of how Muslim women who are surrounded by street billboards cope with their possible effects on their children; and an exploration of the way Muslim mothers negotiate their children’s media consumption within the context of their religious and moral appropriateness. At the core, this is a study of Muslim mothers’ engagement with media in their everyday lives as mothers and as women. I argue that active agency and constant negotiations have led many participants to examine their piety as Muslim women and mothers since the space around media, in their consumption and media talk, provides a platform for engaging with public discourses of religion, gender, and motherhood. Media become sites in which Muslim mothers discuss Islam, voice their views and Islamic understandings, embrace their piety, as well as give judgements to others whose opinions or experiences are not similar to theirs. There are indeed multiple ways of understanding Islam in Indonesia, which have coexisted within a secular context for centuries and these women are negotiating their way through Indonesia’s opposing forces of secularism and Islamism.
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    Gender, migration and politics : pre- and post-migration experiences of Iranian women in New Zealand : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Politics, Massey University, Albany, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2019) Kooshesh, Parisa
    Islam and Muslim women have become objects of considerable political controversy in countries such as Australia, France, and the USA, although less so in New Zealand. The dress-codes, customs and political allegiances of Muslim women are all debated for political reasons, and yet the diversity among these women is commonly overlooked. However, this study of women who have come to New Zealand from an orthodox Islamic regime shows quite different political orientations and issues in regards to migrant females from Muslim countries in the West. The main aims of this study are to examine the motivations of Iranian females to emigrate from Iran to New Zealand, and to investigate how they redefine their individual and social identities in the new country. The researcher involved semi-structured interviews with 34 Iranian females who migrated to New Zealand between 1979 and 2012. Their lived experiences (pre- and post-migration) are interpreted in the context of wider political ideologies, institutions, laws, social norms, and practices (of Iran and New Zealand) to show how political context influences what people can or cannot do in everyday life. In terms of the women’s motivations for migration, the study shows considerable variety. The participants’ stories reveal how the prevailing political ideology and gender-related policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran affected their daily lives, and how these policies influenced decisions to emigrate. These decisions are both ‘political acts’ and personal choices, involving personal aspirations as well as resistance to Iran’s political ideology and gender discrimination. In terms of post-migration experiences, this study illustrates how New Zealand’s social and political context has influenced the participants’ self-perceptions, their social roles as women, and the ways they relate to public institutions. The study also explores how these changes have affected power-relations within their families. Migration for Iranian females can involve a mixture of gains and losses to quality-of-life. Most commonly, however, these women find that adjusting to a new society and its more liberal, gender-equal environment means greater autonomy and agency. This study also investigates how participants redefine their post-migration social identities. The large majority of participants create a secular social identity after migration. They report being judged according to stereotypical expectations of Muslims, and they use diverse strategies to redefine who they are.
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    Muslim spaces and piety politics : Muslim mothers embroidering multiple interpretations of Islam in the contemporary context of transnational urban landscape of Auckland : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Social Anthropology at Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2011) Hartono, Hanny Savitri; Hartono, Hanny Savitri
    New Zealand has been home to many migrants including Muslims for the past many decades. Muslims from diverse ethnic backgrounds have travelled and chosen this country as their new place of residence. Based on participant-observation fieldwork in Mt Roskill, a suburb in Auckland that is known for its highest Muslim population in New Zealand, this study seeks to map how devout Muslim mothers from different ethnicities strive to live their lives as pious Muslims. This ethnographic research aims to examine two primary issues: Muslim women’s engagement with their role as pious Muslims who endeavour to improve themselves in terms of understanding and practicing Islamic tenets in the midst of multiple discourses and practices available to them; and their engagement with their role as mothers who try to bring up their children as good Muslims in a diverse and increasingly global Muslim community within a larger scale of non-Muslim urban landscape. In particular, this study addresses how these women imbue piety in their children and improve themselves to be better Muslims in different Muslim spaces; home, tafsīr and tajwīd classes, communal prayer, their children’s madrassa and public school. Themes of music, clothing, gender-segregated spaces, greetings and ṣalāt (prayer) among others, emerged throughout the text in which piety politics is the core. For these Muslim women their lives are marked by negotiations to social mores, religious belief and practice vis-à-vis the diverse Muslim community and the larger non-Muslim context.