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Our Story
Janet Bauer and Naima Mohammed began their journey to explore “Islam in Our Midst” in 2002 in Trinidad and Tobago, as Bauer, who had undertaken a comparative project on Muslim women, and Mohammed, who was doing documentary film production, collaborated to uncover the histories of women in a variety of Muslim jamaats across the twin islands. Together, over the past two decades, —with a particular focus on the lives of women and youth, they have explored both the ordinary and extraordinary aspects of Muslim life— from the observant to the cultural as Muslims adjust to living in global spaces of Islamophobia at home and abroad.
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Our Approach
Developing Connections
Connecting and spending time with people in various Muslim communities has given us some insight into how Muslims here live and practice their faith as well as how intimately inter-related the sub-communities are. We have also successfully collaborated with some communities in the area of video production. Our key partner for this is Visual Art and Production Limited. In 2016, industry pioneer, Timmy Mora with Naima's support led a video production workshop for a small group from the Islamic Resource Society - a Jamaat based in the capital city of Port of Spain. Even before that, we had been doing video interviews and exploring how we could fund a documentary on Kareem Ibrahim a Shia Muslim who was charged and extradited to the United States for an alleged plot to blow up John F Kennedy airport in 2007 along with two Guyanese nationals. In 2016 Ibrahim died a convicted terrorist in a maximum security prison in Springfield, Missouri and we still intend to help share his story.
Affiliations
Islam in Our Midst is an international collaboration between Trinity College and its Caribbean Studies Center (Hartford, CT) and Visual Art and Production Limited in Trinidad and Tobago.
Founded in1823, Trinity College is a highly selective, four year nonprofit, nonsectarian liberal arts college, with 2000 undergraduate students and a smaller number of graduate students pursuing Bachelors and Masters degrees. About 18% of its undergraduates are foreign students or of immigrant backgrounds adding to the diversity of the campus. Trinity College offers a range of programs from the sciences and social sciences to the full range of arts and humanities majors, including Anthropology, International Studies, History and Film Studies. One important vehicle for international collaborations is the Trinity in Trinidad exchange program, which brings Trinity students to study at UWI-St. Augustine in Trinidad and Tobago and students from Trinidad and Tobago to study at Trinity College in Hartford. Naima Mohammed worked as the first on-site coordinator for the Trinity in Trinidad program (2000 to 2006). This program has provided opportunities for Trinity students to contribute to earlier research stages of this project .
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Trinity’s new Centre for Caribbean Studies on the Trinity home campus provided a start up grant for this website. The Center seeks to foster collaboration between Hartford, Trinity and the Caribbean to highlight the transnational connections and the multiple contributions of the Caribbean region to world culture.
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In its fifteenth year, Visual Art and Production Limited has earned the reputation of being one of the leading production houses in Trinidad and Tobago. It offers a wide range of top-quality production and post-production services, from broadcast shooting on High Definition video formats to digital editing, streaming internet, CD-ROM and DVD encoding. Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Timmy Mora is well respected as a pioneer in the industry with over three decades of experience and a large library of archive footage of political and cultural aspects of Trinidad and Tobago. VA is our Associate Producer for "Islam In Our Midst" and our audio visual material will be archived in the VA library.
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Team
Janet Bauer is an anthropologist and a professor of International Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. She teaches, conducts ethnographic research, and publishes on women, gender and mobility in Muslim societies and diasporas including Iran, Mindanao (in the Philippines), Europe, North America, and the Caribbean.
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Naima Mohammed has worked extensively as an arts administrator, scriptwriter and producer for video features and documentaries in many disciplines. As an arts administrator, she has varied experience which includes theatre production and project management.
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