ABSTRACT
For over 20 years, Muslim students organized for a prayer space at one West-coast university campus. This paper describes the failed diversity moments and institutional inertia that prompted a group of Muslim women from diverse academic and racial/ethnic backgrounds to conduct a collaborative, participatory-action research (PAR) project. I argue that PAR can be a strategic tool to catalyze institutional agents to enact their promises by creating space for excluded perspectives and by challenging the university’s performative non-performativity. Importantly, I demonstrate that PAR can shift the onus of responsibility to support Muslim students’ basic needs from students to administration. I also argue that this method holds limitations for transformational change, especially when enacted within liberal university spaces that espouse diversity, equity, and inclusion but are still complicit in producing injustices. Even methods based on grassroots social action, such as PAR, can be co-opted and used by the university to mark their trail of diversity success.
