Arij completed her Bachelor's and Master of Social Work at the University of Windsor and is completing a doctorate in Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto). She also has certificates in Critical Muslim Studies (Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial Dialogues) and Social and Cultural Psychiatry (McGill University).
In her clinical work, she has worked as a Mental Health Crisis Worker, and Child and Family Therapist. As a researcher, she has led or contributed to projects exploring experiences of marriage and divorce in American Muslim communities, sexual assault resistance education on campus, and the affective experiences of Islamophobia for young Muslims in Toronto. Her doctoral thesis focused on how young Muslim women’s ways of being are reshaped in modernity, particularly through the anchoring of the self in childhood memories.
Her research is focused on the intersection of race/religion, gender, and violence. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she aims to bring Black Feminist Decolonial Thought and Critical Muslim Studies into conversation with one another in order to see what a Black analytic can offer to the understanding of Muslim women’s subjectivities. Broadly, she is interested in how people come to understand themselves and how these understandings bear on systems of ethics.
