Forgotten Ummah Podcasts

Hizer is a Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. His research covers the fields of Critical Muslim Studies, sociology of religion, secularism, Islamophobia, cultural studies, decoloniality, critical theory and the right wing. He completed his BA in Arabic and International Relations at the University of Leeds and did his Masters in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford. Outside of the University, Hizer has a long history of local and national activism which covered educational, political and interfaith initiatives.

Saeed A. Khan is Associate Professor of Teaching in the Departments of Near East & Asian Studies and Global Studies at Wayne State University- Detroit, Michigan, where he teaches Global Political Economy, Globalization and Global Institutions, as well Islamic and Middle East History, Politics and Culture, and where he also is Director of Wayne State’s Center for Citizenship Studies. In addition, he is a founding member and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Policy & Understanding (ISPU): a Washington-based Think Tank promoting the study and analysis of US social and domestic policy. 

Prof. Khan’s recent publications include “The Gaps of History” in Critical Muslim, Vol. 45, the anthology, Global Studies: A Reader on Issues and Institutions, and the co-authored book, What’s Going on Here? US Experiences of Islamophobia Between Obama and Trump, as well as “Fallacies of Foundational Principles: Rawls’s Political Liberalism and Islamophobia” in ReOrient (March 2017).

Marchella Ward (Chella) is Lecturer in Classical Studies at The Open University. Together with Mathura Umachandran, she co-convenes the Critical Ancient World Studies collective, a global decolonial research collective aimed at telling a new ancient history of the world. She is co-editor of the collective’s first book, Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics and is also the author of Blindness and Spectatorship in Ancient and Modern Theatres: Towards New Ways of Looking and Looking Back, in which she uses assemblage theory to disassemble the classical tradition, and undermine the perpetuation of narrative ableism. Her research frequently draws on disability studies, queer studies and Black studies, and she is especially interested in Muslimness as epistemological insurgency against Western, colonial and Eurocentric epistemicide. She writes frequently for non-specialists, and also writes for children.