14/08/2023
Muhammad Ali hailing from Hussaini village of Gojal Hunza, completed his PhD in Higher Education from the University of Queensland (UQ), Australia.
His thesis, titled, "Desire, Willfulness, and Becoming: Razhek Conversations with Women with Refugee Backgrounds about Their Journey to Postgraduate Studies", explores the stories of female postgraduate students with refugee backgrounds, focusing on their aspirations, challenges, and identities as they navigate the higher education landscape in Australia.
He embark on the PhD journey with great enthusiasm, yet the path was not without its share of turbulence. Throughout his study, he encountered various ethical and methodological challenges in engaging with the complex and unique experiences of women with refugee backgrounds. These challenges pressed him to seek an approach that could be responsive and sensitive to the intricacies of questions related to power dynamics and representation.
"Guided by the theoretical insights of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and the feminist scholar Sara Ahmed, Ali turned to his own Wakhi background and adopted "Razhek Conversation" as a research and writing method. Razhek is a Wakhi word that refers to a small, informal outdoor platform or raised meeting place built in a neighbourhood in the Wakhi-speaking villages of Hunza, Pakistan. Razhek is used for sitting, meeting, telling stories, taking rest, socializing, and discussing personal and social issues.
Drawing on post-qualitative inquiry, he departed radically from conventions of academic writing and chose an alternative and critical path by presenting his thesis in the form of conversation and storying with the inclusion of indigenous ways of being, thinking and doing. The unconventional method was aimed at addressing the nuanced issues of power dynamics and representation. The Razhek conversation method is conceptualized as an informal collective space, allowing diverse voices to converge and collectively amplify their stories of navigating both social and institutional landscapes.
Furthermore, being born and raised in a valley and inspired by the Iranian Sufi poet Fariduddin Attar, Ali chose to structure creatively his thesis as a series of valleys rather than chapters. Each valley represents affective forces emerging from the stories of the inspiring women he had the privilege of researching with. The concept of valley is used to evoke the sense of a journey, with its ups and downs, its challenges and rewards. He chose to use words and concepts from different languages, such as Wakhi, Urdu, and Persian, in his thesis intentionally to disrupt and stretch the boundaries of conventional research practices.
This thesis is at a publication stage and is not available at the moment.