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Marwa I. Abdalla

Ph.D. Student

Marwa Abdalla is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at UC San Diego and recipient of the Jacobs Fellowship from the Division of Social Sciences. Her research focuses on the sanctioning and resilience of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism in U.S. American media and political discourses. She is also concerned with the historic erasure of Black Muslim experiences and the instrumentalization of Muslim exclusion and (qualified) inclusion in projects of U.S. global hegemony. Her research has been recognized with several top paper awards at national and regional conferences, as well as with the President’s Award for Research, the Young Scholar Award for Outstanding Research on American Muslims, and the National Communication Association’s John T. Warren Award. She is the co-recipient of the 2022 National Communication Association’s Advancing the Discipline Grant and the 2021-2022 Waterhouse Family Institute Research Grant. She is also a certified educator with The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), a Washington-D.C.-based research and education organization that focuses on American Muslims and speaks regularly to diverse audiences about the challenges of racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia.

Education

Marwa Abdalla received her B.A. in political science from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, her M.A. from the School of Communication at San Diego State University, and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in the Department of Communication at UC San Diego where she is a recipient of the Jacobs Fellowship from the Division of Social Sciences.

 

Teaching

Marwa Abdalla teaches in the Department of Communication at UC San Diego and has taught undergraduate courses at San Diego State University in the School of Communication and the Department of Television, Film, and New Media. Her courses focus on foundational concepts in communication and cultural studies, the representation of marginalized communities in popular culture, and the legacies of Orientalism in contemporary film and media. She aspires to honor students’ unique positionalities while challenging herself and her students to self-reflexively examine dominant representations and understandings of race, gender, religion, class, and sexuality that might otherwise get taken for granted. In addition to teaching in higher education, Marwa has almost two decades of experience as a community educator, panelist, and presenter working to challenge racism, religious discrimination, and xenophobia. 

Marwa Abdalla’s research focuses on theorizing and addressing racist ideologies across various types of media. Her work has explored the negotiation of identities between Muslim parents and their children in the wake of Donald Trump’s “Muslim Ban” (Abdalla & Chen, 2022a, 2022b). It  has also focused on the erasure and invisibility of Black Muslims in historical narratives of Muslims in the United States as well as at efforts to resist such erasure (Abdalla, 2023). Her current projects focus on the role ideology and affect play in the sanctioning and resilience of Islamophobia as well as on representations of Muslims in contemporary popular media and culture.


Marwa’s research has been recognized with numerous awards including:

  1. Top Paper, Communication, Identities, and Difference Division, Western States Communication Association (2020)
  2. John T. Warren Award, National Communication Association (2019)
  3. Top Paper, Ethnography Division, National Communication Association (2019)
  4. Top Student Paper, Religious Communication Association (2019)
  5. Outstanding Graduate Student Award, School of Communication, San Diego State University (2019)
  6. President’s Award for Research, San Diego State University (2018)
  7. Young Scholars Award for Outstanding Research on American Muslims, Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (2017)
  8. Color Purple Award, Organization for the Study of Culture Language and Gender (2017)

Peer Reviewed Publications:

Abdalla, M. I., (2023). “My Islam be Black”: Resisting erasure, silence, and marginality at the intersection of race and religion. Communication, Culture and Critique, tcac042. DOI: 10.1093/ccc/tcac042

Abdalla, M., Chen, Y. (2022a) “I’m just trying to fill my kids up”: (Re)constructing identities preemptively in response to rising anti-Muslim rhetoric in the United States. Journal of Applied Communication Research. DOI: 10.1080/00909882.2022.2142065

Abdalla, M. I., & Chen, Y. W. (2022b). “So, it’s like you’re swimming against the tide”: Didactic avowals and parenting as intersectional Muslim women in the United States. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 15(3), 274–295. DOI: 10.1080/17513057.2021.1896768

Book Chapters and Professional Reports:

Abdalla, M. (In Press). “#BeingBlackandMuslim”: Intersectional Invisibility in Muslim American Communities, In B. Van Glider, J. Austin, & J. Bishop (Eds.), Communication and Organizational Changemaking for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: A Case Studies Approach. Routledge.

Abdalla, M. (2018). Covering American Muslims Creatively and Objectively: A Guide for Media ProfessionalsWashington, DC: Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. 

Abdalla, M. (2003). A simple smile, Toward the Benefit of Humanity. Georgetown, TX: Southwestern University Press. 

Competitively Selected Conference Papers

Abdalla, M. (2022, November). Imagined communities with material consequences. [Conference presentation] National Communication Association 2022 Conference New Orleans, LA, United States.

Abdalla, M. (2022, November).Media representations of Muslims in the U.S. at the intersection of race and religion [Conference presentation]. National Communication Association 2022. Conference, New Orleans, LA, United States.

Abdalla,  M. (2022, May). “My Islam be black”: (Re)centering identities at the intersection of race and religion [Conference presentation]. International Communication Association 2022 Conference, Paris, France.

Abdalla,  M. (2022, May). “Greater than Fear”: Inclusion, identity, and affect in the Trump resistance [Conference presentation]. International Communication Association 2022 Conference, Paris, France.

Abdalla,  M. (2022, February). #BeingBlackandMuslim: Cultivating racial justice in Muslim social advocacy work [Conference presentation]. Western States Communication Association 2022 Conference, Portland, OR, United States.

Abdalla,  M. (2022, February). “I’m just trying to fill my kids up with the strength they’re going to need”: (Re)constructing identities preemptively in response to rising anti-Muslim rhetoric [Conference presentation]. Western States Communication Association 2022 Conference, Portland, OR, United States.

Abdalla, M. (2020, November). Rhetorical theory and socio-political debate: The case of “Islamic feminism” [Conference presentation]. National Communication Association 2020 Conference, Online.

Abdalla, M., Chen, Y. (2020, November). “Islam is supposed to make people good”: Muslim mothers communicating identities and socialization practices to challenge Islamophobia [Conference presentation]. National Communication Association 2020 Conference, Online.

Abdalla, M., Chen, Y. (2020, February). “So, it's like you're swimming against the tide': the communication and negotiation of identities among Muslim mothers in the United States [Conference presentation]. Western States Communication Association 2020 Conference, Denver, CO, United States. Top Paper; Communication, Identities and Difference Division

Abdalla, M., Winslow, L. (2019, November). Greater than fear: Visualizing Inclusion in American protest rhetoric. Paper presented at the 2019 annual National Communication Association Conference in Baltimore, MD. 

Abdalla, M. (2019, November). A communication model of religious identity. Paper submitted to the 2019 annual Religious Communication Association Conference in Baltimore, MD (Top Student Paper). 

Abdalla, M. (2019, November). The Performance(s) of a Lifetime, A Lifetime of Performances: An Auto-Archaeology of Religious and Cultural Identities. Paper submitted to the 2019 annual National Communication Association Conference in Baltimore, MD (John T. Warren Award for Best Student Paper; Top Paper, Ethnography Division). 

Abdalla, M. (2019, November). The (un)changing rhetoric of hijab. Paper presented at the 2019 annual Conference on Racism and Religion at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism in Uppsala, Sweden. 

Abdalla, M. (2018, April). The negotiation and communication of religious identity among Muslim- minority populations: A theoretical model. Paper presented at the 2018 annual International Islamophobia Conference, Center for Race and Gender, U.C. California, Berkeley. 

Abdalla, M. (2017, April). Rhetorical insights on ‘Islamic feminism’. Paper presented at the 2017 annual California State Student Research Symposium, Sacramento, California

Abdalla, M. (2017, April). The rhetorical functions of hijab. Paper presented at the 2017 annual International Islamophobia Conference, Center for Race and Gender, U.C. California, Berkeley. 

Abdalla, M, Cureton, J., Jennings, J. (2017, November). “How do I explain this to my children?: An auto-Ethnographic investigation of mother-child communication surrounding gender, race, and religion. Paper presented at the 2017 annual meeting of the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender in Omaha, Nebraska.