Biography
Sabina Ali is a PhD student in Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She holds an MA in Religious Studies from Georgia State University, an MTS from Emory University, and BAs in History and Religious Studies from Georgia State University. Her research interests broadly include religion and race in the Americas, and she is very interested in Indigenous studies and methodologies and decolonial approaches. Sabina’s master’s thesis explored the racialization of Jewish people in direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry tests in the US. She has teaching experience at the undergraduate level, at a public high school, and at an educational non-profit. Sabina is Azerbaijani, born in Moscow, Russia, and grew up in what is now Atlanta, GA, the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Muscogee people.
Candidate Statement
My first exposure to the AAR was when I was a graduate student at Emory University and had the opportunity to intern at the AAR office in Atlanta from 2014 to 2015. Since then, I have had many experiences in my life and as a graduate student that have helped me understand some of the diverse ways and reasons that people pursue graduate work as well as some of the structural inequities that continue to impact the most vulnerable and marginalized members of our field.
I have participated in the AAR, nationally and regionally, on and off for the past seven years; yet, as a graduate student, I was often unable to afford to fully participate in the national meetings. My highest level of engagement with AAR was when I was a master’s student at Georgia State University where the Religious Studies department encouraged and supported students to share and present our work, brought us on as partners in the important conversations happening in our field, held practice presentations and panels in safe and constructive spaces, and tried their best to financially support our journeys to, at the very least, regional meetings. From my experience as well as the experience of other graduate students that I hope to represent as Student Director, I truly believe that our emerging scholarship and engagement with our field is most helpful on the local and departmental level as well as regionally, shifting the focus away from expensive and inaccessible national meetings.
As Student Director, in addition to lifting up student concerns about inequities that prevent us from fully participating in the AAR and in our field broadly, including concerns about accessible, welcoming, constructive, and equitable spaces, I also hope to emphasize what the AAR and its members have known for years: students need resources for careers outside of academia because of the collapsing academic job market. It is no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic has taken a significant and devastating toll on higher education, and it is imperative that the AAR address this crisis in academia. It is unjust to continue to go on as we have, business as usual, while more and more students graduate with PhDs with not many traditional job prospects and opportunities to make a living wage within the academy.
Lastly, and very importantly, graduate students are the next generation of scholars of the AAR, our professional community. Many of us are disillusioned with institutions in general and, specifically, with our own institutions’ failures to address structural issues (see, for example, the Open Letter to the AAR Board of Directors on Trans Inclusion or the ongoing prevalence of sexual harassment at national meetings, to name a few). It is critical that the AAR supports and protects all of its members, especially its most marginalized ones, and adjusts itself to the rapidly changing landscape of higher education. I am committed to help shape the AAR as a guild committed to justice and equity, both inside and outside of the academy.