Mapping the Margins: An Intersectional Case Study of How Somali Women Sense, Make Sense of, and Develop Sensibilities Through Urban Public Space in Ottawa, Ontario
Abstract
This dissertation is a rigorous exploration of second-generation Somali women’s relationships to public spaces, in and across the nation’s capital – Ottawa, Ontario. Despite feminist and critical scholarship growing increasingly attentive to how race and gender (e.g., Black women’s geographies) and religion and gender (e.g., Muslim women’s geographies) are navigated in urban space, few studies have examined the ways in which these three identities–chiefly, Black, Muslim and woman–compound to produce a qualitatively distinct urban experience. In the absence of research that goes beyond a two-dimensional model of analyses, this dissertation creates the inaugural theoretical and empirical frames for understanding the spatial implications and experiences of existing at the intersection of race, religion, and gender. To do so, this project utilized mapping focus groups and interviews with 50 second-generation Somali women to explore their complex attachments (e.g., positive, emerging, fractured, absent) to public space in Ottawa. Guided by the question “How do Somali women theorize and negotiate urban public space?,” this inquiry yielded a myriad of intricate and illustrative insights on the relationship between power, positionality, and place. Each of these findings are unpacked via an integrated article format, presented through three interwoven studies on Somali women’s geographies of exclusion, geographies of belonging, and their COVID-19 mobilities. What emerged from this project was an array of insight(s) into the spatial, social, psychic, and physical consequences of being a multiply racialized (Black/Muslim) and gendered (woman) identity in Canada. It chronicles how anti-Black racism and gendered Islamophobia interacts in the minutiae of everyday life, creating a gradient of encounters which range from traumatic to trivial. In addition to its policy implications for local urban planning endeavours, this work offers contributions to feminist geography, Black geographies, critical Muslim studies, cultural anthropology, critical health studies, and Somali diaspora research.