“Ramy” Season 1, Episode 5: “Do the Ramadan” Screening
Ramy Season 1, Episode 5: “Do the Ramadan” Screening
6:15 PM – 7:45 PM
Tuesday, April 13, 2021
Series Description: In New Jersey, Ramy, son of Egyptian migrants, begins a spiritual journey, divided between his Muslim community, God, and his friends who see endless possibilities.
Episode Description: Time for a spiritual cleanse. Get this month right, and you’ll have it all figured out. Fast properly, read your Quran, no sex, no porn… bro, close the MacBook! No porn. Just do the Ramadan.
See the Conversation
Coming together to unpack the episode, we have ACC’s own Radio, Television, and Film Professor, Dr. Mark Cunningham who will be joined by Dr. Habiba Noor of Trinity University and Dr. Banafsheh Madaninejad, co-founder of Interconnecting Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern Americans (I-AMM).
Co-Discussants
Dr. Habiba Noor
Dr. Habiba Noor is an interdisciplinary scholar who has done extensive work with Muslim communities in Texas, New York City, and London. She received a Ph.D. in Media and Cultural Studies from the Institute of Education in London and now teaches at Trinity. She has written widely on media representations of Islam including a recent article in the Islamic Monthly titled “Grassroots Islamophobia in Trump’s America”. Her current research project is titled: “’Between Public and Private: Islam in the 2016 Presidential Elections.” Her doctoral work focused on Muslim youth and their relationship to news of the “War on Terror.” She used an arts-based research method, asking young Muslims from diverse ethnic, class, and sectarian backgrounds, to make news clips on the war. From this research, she argues that contemporary Muslim identity politics are intrinsically linked with the politics of representation and that the burden of representation poses a paradox for Muslim communities as it can be at once alienating and create opportunities for agency and community development. She has also been engaged in research, writing, and activism around Islam and Islamophobia at the legislative and local levels in Texas. More recently, Habiba worked with the Brooklyn Historical Society to write a curriculum for the Muslims in Brooklyn Oral History project.
DR. BANAFSHEH MADANINEJAD
Dr. Madaninejad is a scholar-activist of Islamic Studies, Feminist Studies, and Critical Race Theory. She has taught at The University of Texas at Austin, Middlebury College, and Southwestern University. Her latest Islamic Studies article is “The Limits of a Fixed Qur’an: The Iranian Religious Intellectual Movement and Islamic New Theology” published in Approaches to the Qur’an in Contemporary Iran, Oxford University Press, 2019 and her latest submitted race and feminism article is “Muslim Woman Doing Theory.”
Dr. Madaninejad immigrated to the United States from Iran to go to college, studied physics with a specialty in Chaos Theory at the University of Houston; worked at NASA (Johnson Space Center and Jet Propulsion Laboratory); made a few short documentaries about Iranian politics, became an academic and stayed that way, before leaving in May 2019. These days, it’s all about anti-racist organizing, and capacity building for AMM(Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern) folks.
Dr. M is a resource trainer for the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond—the premiere anti-racist training troupe in the United States where she focuses on honing and sharing her race analysis concerning AMM folks.