Muslim men avoided study participation out of fear of surveillance, not gender norms

Evidence

After conducting the interviews, I found the reason Muslim American men were opting out of participating had less to do with gender relationships and more to do with the fear of surveillance. I believe Muslim American men feared talking to a stranger about their experiences post-9/11 because of the hypersurveillance they have had to endure. Once I secured the trust of a few Muslim American men, they were able to vouch for me to their friends and family members, which is how I was able to incorporate men’s voices in this book. Many Muslim American men and women were harassed at work because of their religious identity and did not want to compromise their employment or bring any more negative attention onto themselves because of their religious identity. For these reasons, I changed the names of the participants I interviewed in order to protect their anonymity in this study. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 488

Categorization

• XREF: This self-censorship out of surveillance fear is exactly the interior experience the reader is hunting for; links to Beydoun’s COINTELPRO-adjacent surveillance-of-Muslims work.
• SEED: The researcher’s own field access becoming data — the methodological snag that itself proves the chilling effect of surveillance — could anchor an essay on how the fear of surveillance produces silence among the surveilled.