“Dabke Is Better Than a Thousand Lectures Against Islamophobia”

“Dabke Is Better Than a Thousand Lectures Against Islamophobia”: Palestine, Arab Mothering, and the Research Imagination

What does it mean to dance a relationship to one stolen land, Palestine, from another stolen land, Haudenosaunee territory on Turtle Island? This article examines methodological considerations for researching what it means to belong to settler states as exiled and racialized people, while committed to Arab youth thriving and ethical lateral racial relations. Drawing from her positionality as an Arab mother, the author engages four methodological imperatives. First, she centers joy and the richness of Arab cultural production, refusing dominant narratives, to produce knowledge of use to her communities. Second, she engages with participants as she would want researchers to engage with her child. Third, the author is wary of surveillance climates Arabs face in settler states. Finally, she honors the participants’ expressions of faith as key to their praxis. Throughout, the author is reflexive of her positionality as a non-Palestinian Arab woman coupled with her belief in the liberation of Palestine as el-qadiyya el-om (the mother of all struggles). She concludes with an addendum, written during month ten of the genocide, theorizing how it radically heightens methodological considerations with and for Palestinian and Arab communities on Turtle Island, and is where she contemporizes her blistering definition of an Arab mothering research imagination.

Lucy El-Sherif; “Dabke Is Better Than a Thousand Lectures Against Islamophobia”: Palestine, Arab Mothering, and the Research Imagination. Meridians 1 October 2025; 24 (2): 555–581. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-11862647

Dr. Lucy El-Sherif is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto (OISE). Her research examines Palestinian and Arab youth transnational subject formation on Turtle Island, with a focus on embodiment, performance, and pedagogies of belonging. Working at the intersection of Arab studies, critical race studies, performance studies, and Indigenous studies, she asks: what does it mean to dance a relationship to one stolen land, Palestine, from another stolen land, Haudenosaunee territory on Turtle Island? Her scholarship approaches culture as political infrastructure, understood as a set of lived, relational practices through which political consciousness is shaped.

A central throughline in her work is how Palestine operates as a structuring axis of Arab racialization in North America. The occupation of Palestine is an ongoing condition that shapes racialization, political viability, and political possibility across transnational space. Her research traces how political subject formation takes shape in everyday spaces long before it is formalized through law, citizenship, or institutions.

Her current book project, Dabke on Turtle Island, develops an analytic account of dabke across transnational sites, theorizing dance as a practice of survivance, ontological refusal and repair, and relational world-making under conditions of racialization and exile. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with youth, community organizers, and cultural producers, the project challenges binaries between the political and the cultural.

Dr. El-Sherif’s work has appeared in venues such as Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association and Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. Across research and teaching, she is committed to emic, grounded methodologies and to theorizing Arab life on Turtle Island on its own analytic terms.

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