Abstract
Despite being legally classified as White, Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) people in the United States have long been racialized as non-White, producing an invisibility/hypervisibility paradox. In other racially minoritized communities, this paradox has been linked to harmful effects across multiple social, political, and economic domains, including higher education. Integrating literature on the racialization of MENA Americans with scholarship on hypervisibility and invisibility among faculty of color within academia, this study examines MENA American faculty perceptions of campus climate and belonging. We address two questions: (1) How do MENA faculty at a predominantly White institution experience this paradox? (2) What possibilities exist for resisting it? Using novel qualitative data collected from a series of focus groups with 24 self-identified MENA faculty across academic programs, we examined their sense of belonging in relation to campus climate. Our findings indicate that MENA identity occupied a paradoxical position, as faculty reported being invisibilized (through confusion, stereotyping, essentialization, lack of support, and silencing), while simultaneously being hypervisibilized (through tokenization, cultural taxation, heightened scrutiny, and hostility). We theorize that transcendence of hypervisibility/invisibility emerges through relational experiences of being truly seen. Such moments enable MENA faculty to cultivate validation and agency, thereby reshaping the terms of belonging under conditions of racialized constraint. Ultimately, our findings contribute to broader conversations about inclusion by highlighting MENA Americans’ conditional belonging, wherein racial politics shape the terms of their visibility.
Introduction
Given their persistent categorical ambiguity within the U.S. racial hierarchy, the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) American community presents a compelling case for examining racialization processes. Despite a long history of MENA communities experiencing racialization as non-White minorities, they have been legally classified as White since at least the early twentieth century. Maghbouleh (2025) argues that this has resulted in the “MENA invisibility/hypervisibility paradox” wherein MENA Americans are statistically invisible in the administrative data infrastructure yet socially hypervisible, especially in the realm of domestic and global politics. They also face poorer health outcomes (Abuelezam, El-Sayed, and Galea 2018), reductions in psychological well-being (Awad, Kia-Keating, and Amer 2019), and problems with workplace discrimination (Abdelhadi 2019; Bennett, Sadek, and Awad 2025), which often go overlooked, undermining the assessment of race-based disparities (Awad et al. 2022).
While these difficult experiences have been documented in various domains, there remains a notable gap in scholarship examining how these dynamics unfold within higher education. Research on other underrepresented minority faculty has revealed patterns of invisibility and hypervisibility in higher education, highlighting their consequences for faculty of color. These include heightened scrutiny (Settles, Buchanan, and Dotson 2019), tokenization (Carter-Sowell et al. 2019), identity taxation (Joseph and Hirshfield 2011; Trejo 2020), and the devaluation of scholarly work (Settles et al. 2022). This study explores how these phenomena manifest in the experiences of MENA American faculty and considers what potential solutions might look like.
By integrating literature on the racialization of MENA Americans with scholarship on faculty of colors’ experiences of hypervisibility and invisibility in academia, and drawing on Black feminist perspectives, this study examines MENA faculty’s perceptions of campus climate and sense of belonging. Specifically, we address two questions: (1) How do MENA faculty at a predominantly White institution experience the paradox of invisibility and hypervisibility? (2) What possibilities exist for transcending this paradox? These questions contribute to broader conversations about inclusion and belonging on campus and reflect the wider phenomenon of MENA Americans’ conditional belonging, wherein racial domination shapes the contexts and conditions under which minoritized groups are made visible. We theorize that transcendence of hypervisibility/invisibility emerges through relational experiences of being truly seen among MENA faculty themselves, by fostering self-definition and self-valuation and thereby enabling them to exercise agency in their processes of belonging. Institutional spaces that support these encounters can facilitate collective advocacy and structural change toward inclusion, transforming relational belonging into lasting structural commitments.
Background
Defining Hypervisibility/Invisibility
The terms hypervisibility and invisibility in the context of identity marginalization originated from Audre Lorde’s (1984) Sister Outsider. The work identified Black women’s experiences of being hypervisible and scrutinized based on their gender and racial identities. Yet at the same time, their accomplishments, unique experiences, and differences are often rendered invisible. Patricia Hill Collins (1986) extends these insights in her seminal article “Learning from the Outsider Within,” theorizing Black women sociologists as “outsiders within” academic institutions. Their roles as scholars grant them proximity to institutional power, yet their racialized and gendered positionalities mark them as outsiders within White-dominated disciplines. Epistemologically, culturally, and demographically, these scholars occupy spaces where their perspectives are excluded or devalued (invisibility), even as Black women’s experiences are made hypervisible through controlling, stereotypical, one-dimensional distortions. Collins (1986) advances Black feminist standpoint theory by highlighting the epistemic strength of the insider/outsider position and the central role of “self-definition” and “self-valuation” in enabling Black women to question and resist ideas that sustain systems of domination.
Building on this work, Buchanan and Settles (2019) conceptualize invisibility and hypervisibility as rooted in power dynamics whereby those with greater power render those with less power invisible and/or hypervisible. The specific ways invisibility and hypervisibility manifest is shaped by individuals’ social identities and their positions of relative privilege and marginalization, and they both mirror and reinforce existing societal and institutional hierarchies and divisions (Buchanan and Settles 2019; Vaccaro et al. 2020), including those of race, gender, class, and, of importance to discussions of the Middle East, religion. Taking these various identities into account, Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach (2008) theorize intersectional invisibility, whereby individuals with multiple marginalized identities, such as women of color, are further erased as they are not seen as prototypical members of any of the marginalized groups to which they belong. These dynamics form inaccurate representations of marginalized groups in which they are not truly visible—not perceived and acknowledged as they are; rather, they are viewed as a token or a stereotype, or they fade into the background altogether. While socially constructed, these processes have very real consequences for faculty of color, including MENA Americans, who are positioned as outsiders within institutions of higher education.
Experiences of Hypervisibility/Invisibility among Faculty of Color
Within the academy, people of color often experience hypervisibility as “heightened scrutiny” (Settles et al. 2019) and as “tokenization” (Carter-Sowell et al. 2019). This means that they experience increased surveillance and scrutiny where any error (real or imagined) is magnified and used to confirm and perpetuate harmful stereotypes (Buchanan and Settles 2019; Turner, González, and Wong 2011), or worse, to justify punitive measures. As tokens (Kanter 1977), they may be expected to speak for “their” entire group or to represent diversity within their department or institution (Vaccaro et al. 2020; Wright-Mair 2023). In part due to such tokenization, faculty holding marginalized identities are often burdened with additional service responsibilities at multiple layers of administration. Whether termed “cultural taxation” (Padilla 1994), “identity taxation” (Hirshfield and Joseph 2012), or “cultural taxation” (Trejo 2020), the patterns amount to unrecognized, uncompensated, and stress-inducing invisible labor (Gordon, Willink, and Hunter 2024).
Even as faculty are made hypervisible as they serve on committees and other service responsibilities, their individual characteristics are often made invisible (Buchanan and Settles 2019). Forms of invisibility include the devaluation of their scholarly work (Settles et al. 2022) and questioning their credibility as academics, as their expertise and scholarly outputs are subjected to greater scrutiny compared to their White colleagues (Carter-Sowell et al. 2019; Ford 2011; Zambrana et al. 2017). Faculty of color also experience invisibility as social, professional, and epistemic exclusion or ostracization within their institutions (Buchanan and Settles 2019; Zimmerman, Carter-Sowell, and Xu 2016). For example, research conducted by minoritized scholars on topics related to minoritized populations is often dismissed as less than proper scholarly research and/or the “objectivity” of such scholarship may be called into question (Abu-Lughod 1991). Consequently, many scholars have identified experiences of invisibility within higher education as an emergent form of microaggression (Newton 2023).
Faculty of color implement various strategies to navigate experiences of hypervisibility and invisibility in the academy. For example, faculty may engage in strategic invisibility to avoid identity-based targeting and microaggressions by withdrawing from toxic work cultures (Buchanan and Settles 2019; Pittman 2012). Others work harder to promote a more positive visibility for themselves and their scholarly outputs to counter forced exclusion. Finally, others may completely disengage from their work (Settles et al. 2019) or from the social life of their units altogether. To what extent and how do MENA Americans experience dynamics of hypervisibility and invisibility in the academy? How might their experiences resonate with, or differ from those of other minoritized faculty in U.S. universities? The extant literature on the racialization of MENA Americans suggests that they too may struggle with the harms of being both simultaneously invisibilized and hypervisibilized both inside and outside institutions of higher education.
The Racialization of MENA Americans
For almost 100 years, MENA Americans have been legally classified as White because of the racially restrictive Naturalization Era (1790–1952) when “Whiteness” was a prerequisite for citizenship. Some early MENA immigrants from the Ottoman provinces of Syria, Mount Lebanon, and Palestine successfully made their case for citizenship by emphasizing their Christianness, overcoming the presumption of non-Whiteness attached to Muslim identities (Beydoun 2018; Gualtieri 2009; Naff 1985). This classification was upheld with the establishment of U.S. federal race and ethnicity standards in 1977, and MENA-identified people have been enumerated as part of the White population ever since.
As a result of MENA aggregation into the White category, any disparities and inequalities faced by MENA Americans have remained obscured, contributing to a “trope of invisibility” both within federal demographic statistical portraits and in the social sciences literature more broadly (Naber 2008). This situation prevails even though, according to Maghbouleh, Schachter, and Flores (2022), most MENA Americans are not perceived, nor do they perceive themselves, to be White. Scholars have documented how, despite legal invisibility, MENA Americans are often hypervisible in political discourse (Hobbs and Lajevardi 2019), the apparatuses of law enforcement and surveillance (Selod 2018), and the media (Alsultany 2012; Shaheen 1985), especially so in the post-9/11 era (Bakalian and Bozorgmehr 2009). This literature suggests that MENA racial classification is not simply a matter of phenotype or ancestry, but rather a dynamic social process shaped by law, policy, media, and geopolitics.
Following Omi and Winant’s (2015) racial formation theory, MENA Americans’ shifting racial status reflects the unstable and politically contingent nature of race itself. This racial fluctuation highlights discrepancies between how others perceive the racial status of MENA traits (external categorization) and how MENA American individuals identify themselves (self-identification). For example, Maghbouleh (2017) shows how Iranian MENA Americans, though legally White, are often racialized as non-White in everyday encounters, thus illustrating limits and contradictions of the White classification. Similarly, Cainkar (2009, 2018) found that with growing anxiety around national security, Arab and Muslim Americans are increasingly constructed as a suspect population due to national security anxieties, further cementing their social exclusion from Whiteness. These studies underscore how legal and regulatory forms of race and social experiences with racialization often diverge, producing paradoxes of invisibilization and hypervisibilization that characterize MENA American experiences. This paradox results in a “conditional belonging,” influencing MENA individuals’ sense of social inclusion and membership in broader society (Sadeghi 2023).
Because many MENA Americans hold multiple marginalized intersecting identities beyond ethno-racial background (relating to class, religion, gender, and immigration status), they may be especially vulnerable to multiple forms of othering. For example, Muslim MENA women who wear the hijab often experience heightened hypervisibility (Haddad 2007; Selod 2018; Shams 2018). Similarly, MENA men, especially those publicly identified as such, are often coded as threatening, untrustworthy, or inherently misogynistic (Bakalian and Bozorgmehr 2009; Haddad 2008; Said 1978) and as a result may be more likely than women to experience “racial harassment” (Abu-Ras and Suarez 2009). Accordingly, MENA Americans often face obstacles and experience stress related to discrimination, prejudice, and internalized stigma. Awad et al.’s (2019) model of cumulative racial-ethnic trauma helps explain how these overlapping forms of marginalization compound over time, negatively impacting psychological and social outcomes.
In the context of higher education, few studies have examined the racialization of MENA Americans. Exceptions include Jaber’s (2022) study of Arab American female students who perceived that their cultural and linguistic heritage was not valued among teachers and peers. Likewise, Mesouani (2025) found that international Muslim MENA students’ campus experiences were shaped by both their time in the United States and the risk of social exclusion. How MENA faculty experience racialization on campus and their experiences within the invisibility/hypervisibility paradox remain an area warranting study.
Data and Methods
This study draws on the qualitative component of a two-year project focused on the experiences of campus climate and sense of belonging among MENA Americans at a large, public, predominantly White university in the Midwest. Specifically, the findings presented here are based on a series of focus groups conducted during the Spring 2024 semester with members of the campus who self-identified as having MENA ancestry.
Focus groups are a form of group interview of up to 12 similar people, brought together to answer questions. The idea is that contributions by individuals can be interactive (either building off each other or providing alternative perspectives). Widely used for marketing research and assessment of products (McQuarrie and McIntyre 1986) or policy research (Kahan 2001), focus groups have also been used to assess racial climate for marginalized populations in higher education. For instance, Hikido and Murray (2016) used focus groups of students at a large, diverse university to better understand how White supremacy is reproduced even in the context of celebrating diversity. In a similar vein, Smith et al. (2007) analyzed focus group data on racial inclusion grievances with administration. Harwood et al. (2012) used focus groups to analyze how students of color experience microaggressions in residence halls. While we could not find examples of use of focus groups for racial climate analysis with faculty, Donlevy (2007) used focus groups with non-Catholic teachers at parochial schools to analyze experiences of exclusion.
Procedure
Our broader study had two distinct parts. One part was supposed to have been a survey in Fall 2023 of students, faculty, and staff on campus to collect basic demographic data to estimate both their size and identify patterns regarding their experiences as MENA-identified people on campus and in the surrounding communities. We initially planned to have a portion of the survey that would recruit interested faculty and students to participate in the follow-up focus groups that would further explore the issues that emerged from the survey.
Because of administrative delays to the survey, we ended up amending the research design, instead opting to do focus groups of students and faculty in Spring 2024. We recruited through email solicitations and flyers distributed to organizations on campus with significant MENA membership. For students, this included student ethnic and religious affinity associations. For faculty, this included reaching out through selected programs known to host high numbers of MENA scholars, as well as cultural and religious institutions in the area such as the local Islamic Center. We then recruited participants through snowball and word-of-mouth strategies.
Given the differing social location and power of faculty and students in a university environment, we chose to have different focus groups for students and faculty. We provided food and drinks as an incentive for participation. Since Ramadan took place during March and early April of 2024, one of the student focus groups involved iftar—when Muslims break the fast.
In total, the research team conducted five focus groups: three with faculty and two with students. The total number of participants was 38 MENA-origin students (14) and faculty (24 total). For this article, we utilize data from the faculty focus groups to address the problems of invisibility and hypervisibility among faculty. The logic behind this decision relates to the different social locations of students as compared to faculty. Forthcoming publications will address this tension more squarely.
The faculty participants represented a range of appointments, including administrative roles (e.g., center directors), full, associate, and assistant professors, as well as non-tenure stream faculty. In terms of gender identity, 62.5 percent identified as women and 37.5 percent as men. Regarding immigrant status, 62.5 percent were foreign-born and 37.5 percent were U.S.-born. Additionally, 70 percent held tenure-stream positions, while 30 percent were in non-tenure stream roles. In the absence of institutional demographic data on MENA-identified faculty, representativeness is difficult to assess. However, the campus is located in Michigan, a state with an estimated 310,087 residents reporting MENA descent (U.S. Census Bureau 2020), about 3 percent of the total population (compared to 1.5 percent nationally). To ensure confidentiality and privacy, pseudonyms were assigned to all participants, and any information that could allow for identification was removed.
Our interview protocol addressed a range of topics, including perceived identity and MENA/White identity, campus climate (comparing experiences upon arrival, over time, and at the time of the interview), sense of belonging, and future hopes and ambitions for MENA faculty on campus.
The research team consisted of seven members (four faculty members, one graduate student, and two undergraduate students). Each member of the team (except one) identifies as MENA American, thus contributing to insider status and informing the interview protocol. While conducting the focus groups, faculty team members took turns leading the sessions, with one actively asking questions, while others managed logistics, time, and participant interactions. Student research assistants helped with taking meeting notes, including palpable quotes and watching body language. We attempted to attend to issues of over-participation by any one focus group attendee. In other words, we intentionally called on all those seated at the table so that the conversation was not dominated by an especially talkative participant. The focus groups lasted between 1.5 and two hours. Each session was audio recorded, so quotes presented here provide a reasonably reliable record of what respondents said.
The team members journaled on initial reactions immediately following each focus group session, a standard qualitative methods practice (Atkinson and Delamont 2011). These were then collected and shared among the team during debriefing sessions. The interviews were then transcribed by research assistants, aided by transcription software. To analyze the qualitative data, team members individually analyzed the transcripts, inductively identifying themes and then placing key quotes under those themes. Then the team met as a group to identify similar themes and codes. When there were disagreements about interpretation of quotes, the team discussed the differences and came to an agreement about meaning and placement.
Findings
MENA Faculty Experiences with Invisibilization
Invisibilization as Confusion
Focus group data revealed that MENA faculty experience invisibilization in multiple forms. One form surfaces in awkward interactions with students, colleagues, or administrators, whose unfamiliarity with MENA identities can lead to confusion when engaging with individuals they perceive as “foreign” or racially ambiguous. As Rania put it, “personally, the confluence of culture and religion affects me. Because I wear a hijab, what happens is, people make assumptions. People are confused.” This, in turn, produces moments of impropriety, such as probing questions concerning religion and ethnic origins, or the commonly experienced surprise that MENA American faculty might speak, read, or write English at a high level, even if born and raised in the United States.
This confusion gets especially challenging when it goes beyond the interpersonal level because it becomes unclear how they should be categorized within institutional racial and ethnic identification schemas. Indeed, participants at times reported uncertainty about how they “fit” within the pre-established ethno-racial categorization schemes of the university. Such moments of invisibility manifested because of racial ambiguity, and even occurred—somewhat ironically—during sessions explicitly focused on rectifying campus issues with diversity, equity, and inclusion. For example, Heba shared,
[The College] did listening sessions, and they were categorized: staff, faculty, Black, White, Asian, whatever [. . .] And my ethnicity didn’t fit into any, so actually I asked the organizer, “Where do you want to put me? Put me where you think I fit best.”
After trying to address this confusion directly, this participant was placed in the final listening session, which she described as a “cover-all for anyone who couldn’t make any other session for faculty.” When asked how the experience of being a leftover made her feel, she replied flatly: “I’m used to it.”
Heba’s narrative illustrates how, in the absence of formal recognition and intentional space-making for MENA faculty, their experiences risk being overlooked or relegated to a generic “catch-all,” lacking the same recognition and institutional visibility granted to others.
Invisibilization as Essentialization
Beyond a lack of formal racial categorization and the invisibility that stems from racial ambiguity, faculty also described encountering, and having to fend off, essentializations resulting from ignorance. Many, for example, experienced the frequent conflation of Arab/MENA identity with Muslim identity. One faculty member, Ashwak, who identifies strongly with her nationality, shared how essentialization has led to the erasure of her ethnic identity:
I never say I’m Muslim, but I’m visibly Muslim. I never introduced myself as Muslim. And yet people think of me as Muslim first and when they talk about me, they’ll say, “oh, we have a Muslim faculty member here and go talk to them.” And so I thought that was interesting, because I’m very, I’m very vocal about my [national] identity specifically, and yet, that’s not what comes up first to people. People might think of me as like culturally kind of ambiguous because I do have different ethnicities, but they tend to just see me as the Muslim faculty.
Another faculty member explained that the conflation between MENA and Muslim
renders Arab Christians invisible in the conversation, particularly in [the Midwest] where they have a history of existing. And I think we need to really think about the Arab Christian experience in [the Midwest] and how they’re often omitted in conversation.
Here, invisibility is not about being overlooked but rather being flattened into a monolithic identity that erases religious and cultural diversity within the MENA category.
In another focus group session, Rafik, who identified as MENA and Christian, described how this blind spot led to a prolonged and awkward series of exchanges within his department:
I would say that microaggressions, there have been several times where there are those who ask, “where you come from?” But there’s also the assumptions. [. . .] So even colleagues, when they say, “well, you’re from [MENA nation] . . .” and automatically they make assumptions about what religion you follow. And I get that a lot. And, you know, the office would assume that for example, I’m Muslim and I’m fine with that. Absolutely. And then the whole year when they kept talking about Ramadan. And yeah, “of course, you’re fasting.” I didn’t say that about myself. But then after a whole year of them talking to me as a Muslim, I said “I’m not Muslim.” They were like, in shock. So yeah, so there’s this thing, which is you’re from the Middle East, you’re automatically one religion.
When Rafik shared the part of the story of disclosing his religion to his colleagues, the other MENA faculty participants present in the focus group audibly groaned. The reaction in the room seemed to indicate that his encounter, while frustrating and hurtful, was also not very surprising.
Likewise, Başak explained essentialization of MENA faculty this way: “I think there’s this assumption that you’re from the region, you represent everybody [. . .] people don’t understand that our experiences are totally different. Even though you may come from the same country.” As Başak’s comment indicates, essentialization effectively reduces MENA individuals to a fixed set of characteristics presumed to be inherent to the group.
She then explained what is at stake when the internal diversity of MENA people goes unrecognized. She recalled one colleague’s commentary, rooted in an essentialized view of Muslims as religious by definition. Upon learning that she was developing new research focused on an activity proscribed by most interpretations of Islam, “She told me, ‘You don’t even [do that activity], right?’ Because I’m Muslim. I don’t [do that activity]. Therefore, I cannot study [it].” At issue is not merely how her colleague’s essentializing view denied the possibility of secular Muslims. Another implication is that Muslim MENA faculty cannot, or should not, study certain aspects of global culture that could be potentially damaging to their long-term research trajectory and publication pipeline; this is particularly the case if such assumptions are shared by members of grant review committees or journal editorial boards.
Invisibilization as Lack of Support
Invisibilization can mean that a group’s needs, contributions, or challenges go overlooked or treated as if they do not exist, leading to a state of “social and professional exclusion and epistemic exclusion” (Settles et al. 2019:1), wherein marginalized group members are disadvantaged by being denied recognition, legitimacy, authority, and voice. In the case of MENA faculty, this meant bearing witness to an absence of interpersonal and institutional backing on campus.
To make this point, Yusra compared how her department talked about the ongoing violence in Palestine to that in Ukraine, noting that when the conflict started up in Ukraine “we had lots of discussions even though we don’t have any faculty from Ukraine in my department that I’m aware of.” She contrasted this to the ongoing genocide in Palestine:
And then it’s complete silence [about Palestine] after October 7. There’s complete silence, you know? It’s a very sensitive topic, no one wants to talk. No one wants to even come check on you. You cannot pinpoint this and say it’s discrimination but at the same time, the invisibility, like complete lack of support compared to other situations is what matters.
Beyond the personal harms of invisibilization, faculty also highlighted the emotional toll of witnessing and supporting others in the MENA community who were marginalized on campus. One participant shared how her MENA students lean on her for support because it often feels like “no one cares about them here. Or that what’s happening to them and their people and their families doesn’t matter.” Maalek recounted incidents of microaggressions, harassment, and even physical assaults targeting MENA and Muslim students in the wake of 9/11 and the 2016 election—some of which were perpetrated not only by student peers but also by faculty. These experiences, he noted, deepened his skepticism toward the institution’s capacity and willingness to provide meaningful support to the MENA campus community, particularly in times of need:
So there are things that are happening, that are disturbing, and I think there’s this feeling that you [. . .] you don’t really know. [. . .] I guess, to what extent is the university gonna go to bat for you? And so, you know, there are times where I feel supported, and I feel very supported, but there are times where you feel like you’re really just like a little ant and you just want to be careful not to get stepped on.
Maalek’s use of “little ant” illustrates how the experience of being minimized is a defining aspect of invisibilization. Notably, he concludes with, “you want to be careful not to get stepped on,” showing how the responsibility for avoiding harm is often shifted onto minoritized communities themselves. This framing reveals how invisibilization can be internalized as self-surveillance, where marginalized individuals are expected to navigate risk without institutional protection that might be offered to other groups or units.
Invisibilization as Silencing and Self-censorship
How common is it for minoritized individuals to feel they must self-regulate in unsafe environments? The focus groups with MENA faculty show how the process of invisibilization can sometimes be self-imposed in the form of silencing and censorship, especially, but not exclusively, around politics. As Başak explained,
I think in a lot of cases, a lot of you know, this feeling like I can be thrown under the bus. It’s not something so clear, so obvious that comes at you. You really don’t know where it came from. So that kind of insecurity that you know that it will happen. It just inhibits you. [. . .] You self-censor.
This explanation shows how MENA faculty take on racialized emotional labor. Where silence becomes a necessary tactic of survival in a professional setting, it is the faculty member who pays the price.
Yet, MENA faculty revealed that they were not only looking out for their own self-preservation but also that of MENA students on campus. When racialized emotional labor is directed toward caring for minoritized students, it can result in exhaustion, exploitation, and frustration. Ashwak explained the burden like this:
There are [MENA] students who are expressing views that are also vulnerable, and there’s a university that completely ignores you until somebody shines a light on you and [the administration is] going to be the first to throw you under the bus and I’ve seen that happen around me quite a bit. But at the same time, I think to myself, [. . .] do we just keep quiet? We will never be enough for them. [. . .] It’s the fact that I wear a hijab on my head. And if it’s not that it’s that I’m a brown woman. If it’s not that then it’s, I’m a woman. You know? I will never be able to satisfy all of the checklists, all of society.
Ashwak’s quote reinforces the idea that “keeping quiet” is not costless, especially if it occurs at the expense of expressing one’s sense of self and purpose as a scholar and teacher. Yara explained the stakes of self-censorship like this:
Well, alright, we will make sure professors can’t [. . .] you know, we can’t say anything. And so you almost feel like a little bit of a sellout sometimes by not being able to be the person you need to be at times because you understand your own vulnerabilities and your positionality in space. But also it’s kind of sad sometimes. You know, students feel like they need to protect me and I’m like, I shouldn’t need to have you protect me, you know?
Yara’s quote is emblematic of many MENA faculty who reported that they felt like they could not speak freely on campus. In this way, we see how MENA faculty may sometimes suppress their own needs and stay silent about workplace injustices so as not to jeopardize their role as a source of student support. But Yara’s quote also reveals something even more problematic: students may feel a pressure to step in and speak out for their co-ethnic faculty in the face of their silence.
MENA Faculty Experiences with Hypervisibilization
Hypervisibilization as Tokenization
MENA faculty experiences with visibility on campus often swung from one extreme to another, wherein their identity might shift from invisible to hypervisible. As Rania explained, these shifts were often the result of the needs of the institution: “They know to come to us when they need us for PR posts. So they know we exist when it comes to representing the University well, externally. They know we exist when it comes to that.” Likewise, Azar connected MENA visibility to broader Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) logics:
I feel like [University] is very strategic with when they consider me as a diversity token and when they don’t. [. . .] I’m seen as a person of color or non-White when it suits the University and I’m seen as not a person of color enough when it’s, you know, suitable for them. So it’s a very strategic thing that they employ.
Rania and Azar’s quotes show how they experience selective hypervisibilization when their institutions instrumentalize their MENA identity, underscoring how faculty from this group are vulnerable to being reduced to token status. That is, their presence on campus serves a function in larger diversity strategies; they become visible “diversifiers” on campus or numerical minorities who become “representatives of their category” (Carter-Sowell et al. 2019; Kanter 1977:966).
Other examples of MENA identity being strategically used as a diversifier came to the fore from our focus group, including the increasing expectation to participate in DEI-related committee work,
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even if such work is not valued in performance reviews. Yara reflected on the burdens of being hypervisible with respect to her time:
Even the amount of administrative work that you have to do to show that you’re worthy in terms of being a colleague and in the college itself is so much far exceeding what my White colleagues have to do. And I think at times, this is where the university serves its own interests, because DEI becomes such a point for them that you almost find yourself on every committee. They’re like, “Oh, well here [Yara] can serve on this committee and that committee.” And so suddenly you find yourself serving on more committees.
Yara’s narrative shows how hypervisibilization can be exploitative, draining time and energy needed for other responsibilities like research and writing, thus creating structural inequities even when institutions claim to support diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. At the same time, marginalized faculty who do such work, whether out of need to prove oneself or because of pressure from above, run the risk of penalty for doing “too much” service.
Hypervisibilization as Cultural Taxation
Hypervisibility, particularly through the experience of tokenization, can place minoritized faculty in a vulnerable position in other ways as well, including through the expectation of additional labor. Several focus group participants shared experiences of being asked to speak for or represent the whole MENA community and were elevated to the role of expert on all things MENA, even if their academic expertise was far from MENA issues and identity. For example, Rania explained,
[Colleagues] don’t want to ask questions. And they give me expertise that I don’t have. And so what I mean by that is [. . .] if you look at my CV, there was nothing about me specifically focusing on this population, but because they connect Arab and Muslim they give me expertise I don’t think I necessarily deserve.
Rania’s perspective shows how highly visible MENA identifiers, like the hijab, seem to invite others to expect them to represent the whole community. These experiences become a form of cultural taxation (Padilla 1994) which refers to the extra, often invisible labor expected of people from underrepresented or marginalized cultural groups, especially in academic or professional settings because of their identity. This labor typically goes uncompensated or underrecognized and can lead to what Shim (2021) refers to as “token fatigue” or the mental, material, and physical penalties exacted on marginalized groups working in dominant spaces.
In the case of MENA faculty, this fatigue was felt acutely in the wake of global political conflicts because in addition to being asked to represent identity, sometimes faculty were also called upon to be experts in highly contentious political matters. Rania shared a story that occurred shortly after the October 7 attacks in Israel-Palestine:
I had [non-MENA colleague] ask me in November to come to her class and talk about what’s going on. And I’m like, first of all, you know, I don’t study Middle East politics. Second of all, I’m an assistant professor. We’ve seen what’s happening. How can you ask me to be the one to come in there in this shitstorm, excuse my language, of what’s going on? Like I’m making myself vulnerable. You’re asking me to come in and manage and talk to them about what’s happening in Gaza and Israel. [. . .] And I’m like, now I’m being held liable for what’s happening—like why am I managing your class for you? I don’t study this stuff!
Here, we see how power dynamics place a disproportionate burden on MENA faculty. Given the documented erosion of free speech on college campuses throughout the United States, especially with respect to Palestine, the practice of offloading the burden of discussing the ongoing conflict in the classroom onto MENA faculty places them in increasingly vulnerable positions.
Rania explained how this vulnerability grows exponentially when one’s structural position in the academy is considered:
Like I don’t have tenure. And even if I did, we see what happens with tenured faculty. And so again, like it’s not just implicit bias. [. . .] I don’t think they realize how vulnerable MENA faculty are [. . .] that we’re the frontline targets of this hyper-politicized moment.
For MENA faculty, the assignment of responsibility to be experts on Palestine both reinforces their token status and compounds the fatigue of professional and political risk.
Hypervisibilization as Heightened Scrutiny
For many focus group participants, holding a MENA identity on campus meant being not just visible, but overly visible in a way that draws attention and monitoring. When asked about what it is like to talk about MENA politics with colleagues, one faculty member, Javed, explained that the burden of heightened scrutiny makes him more careful about what he says and when. “When you talk to your colleagues, you got to be careful about how far you go.”
Indeed, several MENA faculty reported feeling the stress of being careful in the context of hypervisibility, especially in classroom settings. Başak explained,
You just realize that there’s this constant watch. October 7 is just a new chapter, right? Maybe there’s closer scrutiny. [. . .] I think some of us feel that scrutiny more closely than on an individual or personal level.
This shows how pressure manifests differently when in the role of educator. Faculty are made hypervisible, which in turn subjects them to greater surveillance, criticism, and potential disciplinary measures, especially in a climate of restricted free speech.
Beyond the classroom, social media was frequently cited as another arena that required hypervigilance to avoid unwanted scrutiny. Noor explained that even those with tenure are advised to be “very careful” about what they post online. Maalek recounted an incident in which a public lecture he delivered was picked up by right-wing media commentators:
I gave a talk at [R1 University] a few years ago. And next thing I know [conservative political commentator] was posting on it three days in a row and I’m like, “Gosh, I don’t want a whole bunch of people coming and sending messages to my Dean or whatever.” Thankfully, I survived that okay, but it [. . .] makes me kind of want to hide a little bit and go under the radar. And I’ll be honest, that’s why I’m reluctant to sign things. [. . .] I want to be under the radar a little bit. National folks, you know, can put pressure on our administrators. It’s something that I struggle with, I feel like a sellout too sometimes, but I don’t know . . . it’s a difficult thing to navigate.
This account illustrates the precarious position many MENA faculty occupy with respect to social media. On one hand, these platforms are important for promoting public lectures and scholarly events which are integral for growing one’s professional influence and reach; on the other hand, this hypervisibility can elicit unwanted attention that exposes faculty to institutional pressure and anti-MENA hostility more generally.
Hypervisibilization as Hostility
As hypervisible members of the campus community, MENA faculty across each of the focus groups shared experiences facing hostility on campus, both virtually (often through anonymous emails or comments) and through acts of interpersonal violence and aggression. For example, one respondent, who has organized Muslim and MENA-focused events, reported that signup links have been repeatedly targeted with bigotry. He explained,
When I look at who signs up, people will put in threatening names. Like they enter their threats as the first and last name. So they’ll sign up with like F Muslims or F like-first name f-u-c-k, and then next name is Muslims.
As the organizer, this individual was forced to filter out hateful messages while registering genuinely interested attendees.
Rania shared that she has been the recipient of hate mail on multiple occasions, which signaled to her how her MENA identity is hypervisible:
[University] has kind of been hands off about dealing with the fact that we might want to think we’re White, but the people who send me hate emails sure as hell know I’m not White! And the university is doing nothing except “Oh, I’ll send your email to so and so.” I forward every piece of hate mail I get to my chair. I don’t know where it goes.
Another faculty member, Yousef, encountered an issue with a student making inflammatory and what he termed “racist” comments toward him, and like Rania, he perceived that his grievance was not taken seriously by the administration. He linked his experience to a broader pattern of anti-MENA hostility: “I think like structurally, systemically, there is a big issue. [. . .] And this experience, I see it everyday with the students who are filing reports from the Arab community.” In his estimation, without a formal legal challenge, these concerns will continue to be unresolved, “Because [University] will listen if you show up with a lawyer.” These examples illustrate how, paradoxically, experiences of hypervisibilized hostility can themselves be rendered invisible by university administration.
Opportunities for Feeling Seen among MENA Faculty
In a focus group session, participants were prompted to reflect on their level of comfort talking about current events in the MENA region on campus.
How comfortable do you feel speaking with your colleagues about what’s going on in the MENA world? You know, do you feel like you can speak openly in your department to your colleagues?
[participants around the room shake their heads no]
So I’m seeing some head shakes no. You’re saying no?
No way!
[audible laughter around the room]
Yeah.
It depends.
We’re trying to keep our jobs!
This exchange demonstrates a range of expressions, attitudes, and experiences among MENA faculty and their ability to talk about MENA politics. Some participants immediately began shaking their head “no” when the prompt began, refuting the premise before the whole question was complete. Others laughed at the audacity of the idea. Another was resigned to staying quiet to keep safe. Participant 3, however, acknowledged that “it depends,” showing that sometimes faculty can feel comfortable openly discussing aspects of their MENA identity in the university context.
When pressed for clarification about how and when this might be possible, Nadia jumped in with an answer:
For me, it was when I came to know another faculty from the MENA region. So she was under a lot, a lot of pressure at the moment. She just wanted to talk and I could kind of support her in that moment. She was under a lot of pressure from the kind of lack of understanding from the University. And so I had that kind of experience with another faculty from another department. And because we kind of, you know, connected to shared experiences, we could talk.
Nadia’s response shows that when MENA faculty can identify each other and connect on the basis of shared experience, they can speak openly, listen, and support one another in ways not usually possible with other faculty. In this sense, being seen becomes an act of what Collins (1986) terms “self-definition and self-valuation,” a way for MENA faculty to subvert the controlling images that stereotype, dehumanize, and otherwise constrain them.
Another participant, Azar, shared a disturbing story in which a colleague visited her in her office and began making what she perceived as “explicitly prejudiced and racist” comments about Gaza and the Palestinian people. After the conversation, she saw a MENA colleague passing in the hall. Azar waved her into her office. As she described, “[Colleague] walked in and I saw her and burst out crying. There wasn’t even a hello. I just started sobbing and she held me and we sobbed and then had to leave. And that is the extent of community.” In the retelling of this story, Azar showed how she did not even need to speak words to feel heard in the presence of others from her community.
These examples show that in a context marked by both hypervisibility and invisibility, moments of feeling seen on campus are rare but precious. They therefore take on heightened importance, offering a deep sense of relief. To feel seen means more than being visually noticed or numerically counted; it entails being recognized and understood in one’s full humanity, identity, and experience. For MENA faculty, being seen on campus means receiving genuine acknowledgment and validation of who they are and what they contribute. Consequently, the experience of feeling and being seen allows MENA faculty to move beyond the contradictory pressures of hypervisibility and invisibility, fostering a sense of belonging and collective empowerment that neither constant surveillance nor neglect can provide.
Discussion and Conclusion
The invisibility/hypervisibility paradox is a Janus-faced racialized formation in which each dimension sustains the other. The data from this article show how silencing, for example, often emerges from the heightened scrutiny and surveillance that accompany overexposure, while essentialization exposes MENA faculty to cultural taxation and hostility. These intertwined processes illustrate how the belonging and inclusion of MENA-identified faculty in predominantly White institutions is uneven and, importantly, contingent. Hence, they experience consistent constraint in terms of agency over the terms of their own visibility.
What is more, this article demonstrates how intersecting identities mediate both the timing and intensity of the paradox. Muslim MENA women, particularly those who wear a hijab, embody a form of gendered racialization in which the outward dimensions of their religious identity marks them as hypervisible on sight, exposing them to intensified scrutiny and essentialization (e.g., “because I wear a hijab, people make assumptions”). Likewise, other publicly embodied markers of MENA identity, such as one’s accent, phenotype, or facial hair, can trigger similar forms of hypervisibility, hostility, and their associated consequences. At the same time, intersectional invisibility is evident in the case of Rafik, whose Christian identity is obscured because the prototypical image of a MENA person is presumed to be Muslim. Similarly, Ashwak, who describes herself as “very vocal” about her national identity, is nonetheless read one-dimensionally as Muslim because she wears a hijab, rather than being recognized in terms of her full, multiple identities.
Importantly, one’s positionality within the university hierarchy (such as tenure-track vs. fixed-term status, or assistant professor vs. full professor) also shapes how the paradox unfolds. As expected, faculty in more vulnerable positions (such as assistant professors and fixed-term faculty) report feeling disempowered in responding to marginalization on campus. Yet, notably, even those in leadership roles described experiencing constraints on their agency. As a result of their responsibilities for leading units or advising students, they faced heightened scrutiny. These dynamics reveal that institutional rank does not shield MENA faculty from the systemic constraints imposed by racialization. Thus, MENA faculty encounter situations where professional advancement does not translate into freedom from racialized marginalization.
Instead, we uncovered that one way for MENA faculty to resist or at least dampen the effects of the invisibility/hypervisibility paradox was to experience the feeling of being seen. Being truly seen occurs when MENA faculty are recognized as bearers of full subjectivity (Collins 1986) and offered genuine support, rather than being erased, ignored, stereotyped, tokenized, essentialized, or offered surface-level sympathy. This occurred when in the presence of other members of the MENA community, creating a rare space where shared identities foster recognition and validation. In these rare and fleeting moments, faculty reported a sense of belonging and empowerment that counteracted the alienation they often felt in predominantly White institutional settings. Such relational visibility allowed them to reclaim agency over their identities and resist the imposed narratives of marginalization. Importantly, the rarity of these moments underscores both their significance and their limits. These instances are necessarily constrained, occurring largely within interpersonal interactions among MENA colleagues and a small number of allies, rather than reflecting broader institutional transformation. Without shifts in behavior from those outside of the MENA category, experiences of invisibility and hypervisibility will remain.
These findings corroborate a growing body of research documenting the positive impact of affinity groups on improving institutional climate for faculty of color (Pour-Khorshid 2018). Especially in the absence of effective institutional mechanisms to address the challenges MENA-identified faculty face, such groups might provide critical spaces for mutual support, validation, and collective empowerment, as they do in other marginalized communities (Muraki et al. 2024), and thereby help to counteract the isolating effects of hypervisibility and invisibility, including microaggressions, discrimination, and cultural taxation. Many faculty in this study reported being the sole MENA-identified member in their unit, highlighting the urgent need for formalized affinity groups tailored to their specific experiences. Beyond offering emotional and social support, these groups can foster collective agency, enabling MENA faculty to advocate more effectively for structural change within predominantly White institutions. Facilitating these affinity groups represents not only a practical step toward ameliorating harms but also a strategic intervention to challenge and transform the racialized power dynamics that produce conditional belonging on campus.
In the future, significant changes may be underway in how federal agencies in the United States collect and report race and ethnicity data. In 2024, the Biden Administration announced the addition of a MENA category in federal data collection and presentation. Although it may take years before these technical advances are fully implemented, as federal agencies would not be required to comply with the new standards until 2029, some institutions of higher education have already begun formally disaggregating MENA students, faculty, and staff from the White category. These shifts may hold promise for better recognition and inclusion of MENA Americans, potentially transforming how belonging and visibility are understood and operationalized on campuses and beyond.
However, in the period since the data for this article were collected, significant national changes have been enacted which threaten to undermine the promise of inclusion for MENA faculty in higher education. Immediately following Trump’s second inauguration in 2025, officials have signaled the possibility of not using the latest racial and ethnic category changes (Wang 2025), which would continue MENA American demographic erasure. More broadly, the White House has taken swift and significant actions to roll back DEI programs and initiatives while also chilling free speech through a series of executive orders. As universities and professional organizations engage in “anticipatory obedience” (American Association of University Professors 2025), the spaces within which minority faculty, staff, and students might practice mutual support and advocate for structural change are shrinking at an alarming rate. The effects of this moment are compounded for MENA faculty by the growing suspicion of their identities and the silencing of speech concerning Israel-Palestine and U.S. efforts to reorganize regional alliances ever more in its favor.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Tina Fawaz and Hady Omar for their research assistance and Salah Hassan for his invaluable contributions throughout the course of this project. We also gratefully acknowledge the research participants who shared their lived experiences during a time of significant vulnerability.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for this project was provided by the Michigan State University Office for Inclusive Excellence and Impact through the Creating Inclusive Excellence Grant program. Additional support was provided by the MSU College of Social Science.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.