UC Santa Cruz

This study examines how 1.5- and second-generation Muslim undergraduates in the United States make meaning of higher education amid the competing demands of displacement, racialized belonging, neoliberal aspiration, and Islamic ethical commitment. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and life history interviews with 20 Muslim students, I use an arrivant framework to analyze how the conditions of migration, empire, and racial capitalism shape students’ relationships to education. The findings reveal that arrivant Muslim students do not simply absorb or resist neoliberal educational logics but rework them through familial narratives of displacement, gendered constructions of cultural authenticity, and moral reasoning rooted in Islamic traditions. Students invoke American exceptionalist discourses of opportunity while contending with anti-Muslim racism, surveillance, and conditional belonging. Rather than treating educational aspiration as a cultural trait of immigrant families, this study theorizes it as a structural condition of arrivant subjectivity, produced by imperial histories and sustained by racial capitalism.