When I was 19, I decided to move abroad, wanting to explore the world and give myself a better professional chance than what my hometown could offer. While it has been an incredible experience, it came with its own set of struggles (both expected and unexpected): one of them being the growing disconnection between me …
Western media has a tendency to tell “a single story” of Africa, and particularly so of African women, which creates a stereotypical perception of Africa and opens the door for unhelpful white saviourism. Last year, Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah recently released an anthology called The Sex Lives of African Women, which explores the sexual lives of …
JAN Trust CEO Sajda Mughal OBE, spoke to My London about her traumatic experience of surviving the 7/7 London bombings and what has changed — and what hasn’t changed — on counterterrorism, seventeen years on. Read more here or below. In the wake of the devastating terrorist attack 17 years ago that claimed 52 …
How many of our instinctive habits are results of our ancestors’ experiences of inequality and discrimination? For years, I have known what the concept of ‘intergenerational trauma’ was, but I’d always thought about it as something that affected other people — something I didn’t really need to think about much apart from just to be …
How bad must the fear be for marginalised minority women who don’t have a solid support system and may even have to deal with suffering domestic abuse alone? Many women in the country are grappling with the fear of going out at night or going out alone, and balancing this with not just becoming a …
Facing barriers due to gendered Islamophobia, cultural norms, and lack of representation, Muslim women often struggle to participate in sports. In 2007, a young Muslim woman from Ontario was going to play a football tournament in Canada. Her name was Asmahan Mansour. At her team’s first match, the referee told her she would not be …
Is sharing Instagram graphics an important way of organising and educating, or an exercise in performative wokeness? Instagram, the land of brunch photos and fitness bloggers, has not always been a political platform. But, in the last year, with the increasing online visibility of the Black Lives Matter movement, the app has seen a boom …
Discomfort with confronting whiteness, and a fear of being labelled as ‘racist’, is preventing White people from engaging in important conversations about race. The last year has seen the explosion of a global conversation about race, with an increased focus on the importance of being anti-racist. However, conversations about racism can often find themselves shut …
In April 2020, Dr. Seema Yasmin published Muslim Women Are Everything, a collection of stories of Muslim women. The book was borne out of an angry tweet — a response to the awe people seemed to be in by the prospect of Muslim women doing anything at all. The tweet then turned into a poem …
Our CEO, Sajda Mughal OBE, wrote in Third Sector about the impossible choice the government is forcing charities to make between appeasing the government and doing their jobs of advocating for the beneficiaries. Read the article here or below: How are charities supposed to campaign on behalf of their beneficiaries but also stay on the ‘good’ …
