From oral histories to visual narratives:
re-presenting the post-September 11

experiences of the Muslim women in the USA

Mei-Po Kwan
Department of Geography, The Ohio State University, 1036 Derby Hall,

154 North Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210-1361, USA, kwan.8@osu.edu

Since the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in
Washington, DC on 11 September 2001, Muslims or Muslim-looking people in the USA
have experienced a significant increase in hostility and hate violence. The anti-Muslim
hate crimes have affected the lives of these people of color in significant ways. In this
article I seek to recover part of the post-September 11 experiences of American Muslims
that were obfuscated by the dominant anti-Muslim master narrative, which conflated the
Islamic faith with terrorism and constructed all Muslims as dangerous anti-American
outsiders. I explore a way of telling stories about these experiences using the expressive
power of geospatial technologies. Using the experiences of a Muslim woman in Columbus
(Ohio, USA) as an example, I describe how the technological spaces afforded by
geographical information systems (GIS) may be used to illuminate the impact of the fear
of anti-Muslim hate violence on the daily lives of Muslim women and to help articulate
their emotional geographies in the post-September 11 period.

Key words: anti-Muslim hate violence, fear, geospatial technologies, GIS, September 11.

Introduction

The attacks on the World Trade Center in New

York City and the Pentagon in Washington,

DC on 11 September 2001 were not only

shocking to people around the world. It also

posed an enormous challenge to the US

government: how can the terrorist attacks be

explained and how can the citizenry be

assured that the government is still capable

of securing the safety of the nation and its

population? It was apparent to the Bush

administration that the most urgent task right

after the attacks was to mobilize effective

‘means, mechanisms, procedures, instruments,

tactics, techniques, technologies and vocabul-

aries’ through which the attacks can be

rendered intelligible and their political and

social ramifications made less damaging to the

administration (Dean 1999: 31). In other

words, what ‘technologies of government’

(techniques and practices) or ‘forms of truth’

(rationalities and representations) could the

government mobilize to address the problem

of security after September 11 (Dean 1999: 31)?

The work of Foucault (1991, 1995 [1975])

and the governmentality literature he

inspired offer helpful analytical insights to

Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 9, No. 6, September 2008

ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/08/060653-17 q 2008 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14649360802292462

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the techniques used by the Bush adminis-

tration (e.g. Gordon 1991; Raco 2003; Rose-

Redwood 2006). A commonly deployed

practice, in the context of liberal or neo-

liberal governmentality, is to ‘divide popu-

lations and exclude certain categories from the

status of the autonomous and rational person’

(Dean 1999: 132).

When a group of people (whether citizens or

not) are labeled irrational, deviant, or evil, the

government can explain their actions or the

harms they did simply by their irrationality or

wickedness instead of explicating the complex

social and geopolitical history that might have

contributed to those actions (e.g., the pertinent

geopolitics in the rise of militant Islamic

movements in Central Asia). As summarized

by Foucault’s notion of dividing practices, ‘The

subject is either divided inside himself or divided

from others. This process objectivizes him.

Examples are the mad and the sane, the sick

and the healthy, the criminals and the “good

boys”’ (Foucault 1982: 208). This technique

(binary construction of populations) was the

disciplinary strategy and the biopolitical tech-

nique that the Bush administration used in its

‘war on terrorism’ (Puar and Rai 2002).

While proclaiming that freedom and

democracy were under attack in his televised

address on 20 September 2001, President

George W. Bush invoked a series of binary

constructions that divide all people in the

world into two groups: those who are civilized

and those who are uncivilized; those who

defend economic freedom and those who

would attack America’s way of life; those

who support democracy and those who would

disrupt it (Butler 2002; Winkler 2006). He

grouped all terrorists, including the perpetra-

tors of the September 11 attacks, ‘into a

homogenous group characterized by opposi-

tion to fundamental American values and

proclaimed that terrorists “have a common

ideology . . . they hate freedom and they hate

freedom-loving people”’ (Winkler 2006: 3).

He drew a clear line between the two sides in

the war on terrorism: ‘if you are not with us,

you are against us’ (Butler 2002; Hyndman

2003: 5). Through these binary represen-

tations, Bush explained the attacks on

September 11 as a clash between those who

supported American’s foundational values and

those who opposed them (Winkler 2006).

Through ‘the biopolitical technique of totali-

zation’ he thus constructed an enemy popu-

lation against which the US government and

the American people can take defensive or

retaliatory actions (Rose-Redwood 2006: 472).

With these binary constructions of people, a

powerful master narrative began to be

circulated by other state and non-state actors

via mass media and the Internet. This

narrative extended the boundary for the

group of ‘uncivilized’ or anti-American people

(originally intended for the perpetrators of the

September 11 attacks) to include all believers

of the Islamic faith. Biased statements like

‘Islam is a religion in which God requires you

to send your son to die for him’ (by Attorney

General John Ashcroft), ‘Islam is an evil and

wicked religion’ (by Christian evangelist

Franklin Graham), or ‘Muslims are worse

than the Nazis’ (by televangelist Pat Robert-

son) were broadcast through televised pro-

grams. Many images of anti-Muslim signs and

symbols were disseminated on the Internet,

including a sign that says ‘Avenge U.S.A., Kill

a Muslim now’ painted in red on a wall and a

bumper sticker that replaces the ‘s’ in ‘Islam’

with a swastika (Aly 2003).

As this anti-Muslim narrative that conflated

the Islamic faith with terrorism and con-

structed all Muslims as dangerous anti-

American outsiders captured the popular

imagination, many Americans turned their

patriotic fervor into anti-Muslim hate violence.

654 Mei-Po Kwan

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As Bush’s proclamation on the war on

terrorism turned into a military response

(Hyndman 2003; Puar and Rai 2002), the

anti-Muslim hostility evolved into assaults on

the individual bodies of the Muslims or

Muslim-looking people (e.g., people of color

with distinct attire like the Sikhs) in the USA

(Ahmad 2002). As Ahmad (2002: 101) argues,

‘Among the enormous violence done by the

United States since the tragedies suffered on

September 11 has been an unrelenting,

multivalent assault on the bodies, psyches,

and rights of Arabs, Muslim, and South Asian

immigrants.’ Further, as a result of the highly

racialized, state-sanctioned counter-terrorist

measures since September 11, the citizen-

ship and identities of these people of color in

the USA have also been seriously contested

(Ahmad 2002). The disciplinary power of the

master narrative that totalized all Muslims as

terrorists also ‘dissolved’ the Muslim popu-

lation into ‘individual bodies that can be kept

under surveillance . . . and, if need be

punished’ (Foucault 2003: 242).

While Muslims and Muslim-looking individ-

uals in the USA have experienced a dramatic

increase in hate violence since September 11, the

response to the anti-Muslim incidents from the

media and the administration has been largely

muted. As Ahmad (2002) observed, the post-

September 11 anti-Muslim killings have been

treated differently from other recent hate

killings in the USA. While still considered

wrong, post-September 11 anti-Muslim hate

crimes have largely been understood as the

result of a ‘displaced anger’ that ‘the vast

majority of Americans sympathize and agree’

(Ahmad 2002: 108). The perpetrators of these

crimes were

guilty not of malicious intent, but of expressing a

socially appropriate emotion in socially inappropriate

ways . . . the hate crime killings before September 11

were viewed as moral depravity, while the hate

killings since September 11 have been understood as

crimes of passion. (Ahmad 2002: 108)

This article seeks to recover part of the post-

September 11 experiences of American Mus-

lims that were obscured by the totalizing

master narrative. It explores a way of re-

presenting these experiences as counter narra-

tives using the expressive power of geospatial

technologies. Using the experiences of a

Muslim woman in Columbus (Ohio, USA) as

an example, the article describes how the

technological spaces afforded by geographical

information systems (GIS) may be used to

illuminate the impact of the fear of anti-

Muslim hate violence on the daily lives of

Muslim women and to help articulate their

emotional geographies in the post-September

11 period. This focus on geospatial technol-

ogies is shaped by the aims and purposes of

this Special Issue, entitled ‘Spatial Technolo-

gies/Technologised Spaces.’ The article

attempts to show that geospatial technologies

like GIS can integrate a wide variety of

geographic data and qualitative materials

and can provide a multimedia interactive

environment for interpreting and telling

stories about people’s lived experiences

(Kwan 2002, 2004, 2007; Kwan and Ding

2008). The case of a Muslim woman is drawn

upon to illustrate how oral histories may be

used to construct GIS-based visual narratives.

The article is not primarily intended to be a

report of the results of my study on the Muslim

women in Columbus.

Anti-Muslim hate violence since
September 11

Since September 11, Arabs, Muslims, and

South Asians in the USA have experienced a

Oral histories to visual narratives 655

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dramatic increase in hostility and hate violence

(Ahmad 2002). According to the Council on

American-Islamic Relations (2002), there

were more than 1,500 reported incidents of

attack and discrimination against American

Muslims by the end of 2002. These incidents

include twelve killings, firebomb and arson

attacks on Muslim properties (mosques or

businesses) and homes, physical assaults with

fists, knives or guns, a hate rape, and work-

place discrimination. Because of the tightened

security measures brought about by the US

Patriot Act, a large number of Arabs,

Muslims, and South Asians in the USA were

profiled, detained or interviewed by law

enforcement agents, and many Muslim char-

ities and businesses were raided or closed

(Council on American-Islamic Relations 2002).

While unprecedented effort and resources were

committed to protect US citizens and assets in

the name of homeland security, ‘homeland

insecurities’ is perhaps a more befitting descrip-

tion of the post-September 11 experiences of

these people of color (Ahmad 2002: 101).

The anti-Muslim hate violence has affected

the lives of Muslims and Muslim-looking

people in the USA deeply. Besides the

possibility of being closely watched by

surveillance technology as part of the post-

September 11 counter-terrorist measures,

being verbally abused or physically attacked

has become an imminent possibility for the

eight million American Muslims. As news

about violent anti-Muslim hate crimes reaches

them through mass media, the Internet, and

friends and relatives, fear of being attacked or

harassed in public spaces has become part of

their daily lives. The totalization of all

Muslims as terrorists by the dominant master

narrative has not only produced American

Muslims as feared/hated subjects but also

turned many of them into fearful subjects. For

many American Muslims, negotiating urban

spaces in their daily lives has become a

hazardous endeavor since September 11.

Yet most of the distressing, and even

terrifying, post-September 11 experiences of

American Muslims have received only scant

media attention. Few (if any) serious anti-

Muslim incidents have made the headlines—

which include an arson attack that totally

burned down a mosque, an Indian man

wearing a turban (the headdress of Sikhs)

was mistaken as a Muslim and shot dead

while working at the gas station he owned, a

Yemen man was shot twelve times in the

back while fleeing from his attacker, and a

15-year-old Muslim girl was raped inside a

drug store by an 18-year-old man while he

was making anti-Muslim comments (Council

on American-Islamic Relations 2002). Vic-

tims of these anti-Muslim incidents include

not only Muslims but also anyone who looks

like a Muslim or an Arab. Many non-

Muslims such as Sikh men (with readily

identifiable turbans and long beards) and

Hindus, and many non-Arabs such as

Indians, Pakistanis, and other South Asians

were affected. Much of this hate violence, as

Ahmad (2002: 104) suggests, ‘depends on a

fungibility of “Middle Eastern-looking” or

“Muslim-looking” people with the individ-

uals who committed the September 11

attacks and leaves Arabs, Muslims, and

South Asians enormously vulnerable.’ But

the violence has also affected other people of

color (e.g., Latinos in Los Angeles), and it

was apparent that what is at issue is not that

one is Muslim or Arab, but that one is

ostensibly ‘non-American.’ This hate violence

can be thus be understood, as Ahmad (2002:

104) argues, as the result of ‘racial profiling’s

flawed logic (people who “look Muslim” are

more likely to be terrorists, therefore if we

are attacking terrorism we should attack

people who “look Muslim”)’.

656 Mei-Po Kwan

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AstudyontheMuslimwomeninColumbus

To recover the lived experiences of American

Muslims and to understand the impact of anti-

Muslim hate violence on their lives, I conducted

a study that focuses on the post-September 11

experiences of a group of Muslim women in

Columbus (Ohio, USA). The study explored

how anti-Muslim hostility affects their daily

activities and travel, access to and use of public

spaces, as well as perception of the urban

environment (especially their perception of

safety and potential risk in the city before and

after September 11).

The study focused on Muslim women

because they are especially vulnerable to

anti-Muslim hate crimes and discrimination

since many of them can be easily identified in

public places based on their distinctive

religious attire (Moore 1998; Shakeri 1998).1

Women of the Islamic faith who practice such

religious attire wear the Muslim headscarf

(hijab) in public spaces and in the presence of

men outside the family (Shakeri 1998).

Further, Muslim women are particularly

vulnerable because their traditional gender

role in the family renders it necessary for them

to undertake many out-of-home activities in

their normal daily lives (e.g., chauffeuring

children to and from schools). As many of

these household responsibilities impose rather

restrictive space-time constraint on their daily

lives, the need to undertake them can make

their lives particularly stressful in the post-

September 11 period. To avoid the risk of

being harassed or attacked after September 11,

some Muslim women might change their

religious attire, while some others might

modify their normal daily activities and trips

(Muslim Women’s League 2001). Like indi-

viduals in other social groups who want to

avoid violent attacks, they may also change

the places they normally visit or the time they

visit these places (Pain 1997, 2001; Valentine

1993). The study aims at understanding the

short-term and long-term impact of Muslim

women’s fear of being attacked on their daily

activities and trips, and the strategies they

adopted to cope with the threat of anti-

Muslim hate violence.

Thirty-seven Muslim women who live in

Columbus were recruited with the help of a key

informant who has been an active member of the

local Muslim community for twelve years. Data

were collected from these women through

mixed methods in a sixteen-month period

from late 2001 to early 2003. First, an activity

diary survey was conducted to record their

activities and trips in a designated survey day.

Each activity diary recorded data for all

activities that a participant undertook in the

survey day, including their starting and ending

time, travel mode, street addresses, and pur-

poses (e.g., household responsibilities, rec-

reational or social purposes, etc.). Oral

histories were then elicited through in-depth

interviews with each participant shortly after

the activity diary survey. They are the partici-

pants’ stories about what kind of changes

September 11-induced hate violence might

have brought to their daily activities and their

perception of safety and risk in the urban

environment. These oral histories were recorded

with digital recorders with the permission of the

subjects and transcribed for subsequent anal-

ysis. In addition, each participant also sketched

on a map of the study area to indicate the activity

locations they frequent and the areas they

consider unsafe before and after 9/11.

Oral history is a method of narrative inquiry

that seeks to collect and analyze the stories

people told about their lived experiences of

past events or major turning points in

their lives (Creswell 2007; Denzin 1989;

Oral histories to visual narratives 657

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Ritchie 2003). It aims at providing natural and

rounded personal accounts based on partici-

pants’ first-hand experience, memories, and

knowledge through multiple in-depth inter-

views using open questions (George and

Stratford 2005; Ritchie 2003). Oral history is

often considered a helpful means for recover-

ing people’s lived experiences of past events

based on their memories and personal narra-

tives of those events and how they have

affected their lives (Creswell 2007; Kwan and

Ding 2008; Nagar 1997). They may enrich our

understanding of the experiences of those who

do not have access to means of publicity and

whose thoughts, feelings, and actions are

obscured by the dominant discourse (Nagar

1997). As first-hand testimonies, oral histories

are imbued with participants’ emotions,

feelings and attitudes toward the events or

experiences they narrate. Oral histories,

however, are not objective accounts of past

events and do not provide ‘direct access to

other times, places, or cultures’ (Personal

Narratives Group 1989: 261). There are

inevitably gaps, distortions and omissions in

people’s memories, and these memories are

shaped by the particular personal, family and

social contexts in which they are formed. The

focus of oral history is not only on people’s

experiences as stories but also on illuminating

the social, cultural, and institutional contexts

within which those experiences ‘were con-

stituted, shaped, expressed, and enacted’

(Clandinin and Rosiek 2007: 42). Oral

histories should be understood as co-authored

memories since the researcher often ‘writes

him- or herself into the life of the subject

written about’ (Denzin 1989: 26). They are the

results of the participants’ interpretation of

their own experiences and the researcher’s

interpretation of the participants’ interpret-

ation. As the co-produced text is ‘read through

the life of the reader,’ its meaning may be

further interpreted or re-negotiated by the

reader (Denzin 1989: 26).

Constructing visual narratives with
geospatial technologies

I explore in this and the next sections some of

the ways in which the technological space

afforded by geospatial technologies may be

used to tell stories about the post-September

11 experiences of the Muslim women in the

USA. Using the oral histories and diary data

collected from the subjects as well as the 3D

visualization environment of a geographical

information system (GIS), I created a visual

narrative that focuses on the unfolding of

events and personal experiences over space

and time. A central element of this visual

narrative is a life path that traces the temporal

sequence of events based on a person’s

activities and trips in space-time. As this

method incorporates both the spatial and

temporal dimensions of people’s experiences

and events, it allows the researcher to

articulate how a person’s feelings may change

as she visits different places at different times.

An early example of the oral and life

histories that can be used to construct this kind

of visual narratives is Ulrich’s (1990)

A Midwife’s Tale. The book provides details

about many events and journeys in the life of

Martha Ballard (1735 – 1812), a midwife in

Massachusetts (USA) who maintained a

record of her daily activities for twenty-seven

years from 1785 to 1812. Reconstructing

Ballard’s life story using her diary and many

maps, Ulrich provides a rich and detailed

account of her daily life that also sheds light on

the lives of rural women in late eighteenth

century. Using the account provided by Ulrich,

Opdycke (2000) presents Martha Ballard’s life

story using a map that shows her movements

658 Mei-Po Kwan

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with a set of directed lines in an historical atlas

of women in America. This map and

Opdycke’s interpretation of Ballard’s activities

and journeys together constitute a visual

narrative of her life story.

In Opdycke’s historical atlas, the life story of

Martha Ballard is told with a two-dimensional

map, which does not explicitly portray the

temporal progression of events (and it is

therefore difficult to ‘see’ how Ballard’s

journey unfolded over time).

Drawing upon the representational frame-

work of time geography, which portrays the

unfolding of a person’s life and daily activities as

a continuous life path in three-dimensional

space, geographers have used visual represen-

tations that tell life stories with the time

dimension as an integral element (e.g., Kwan

and Ding 2008). Gregory (1994), for instance,

combines the daily path of a dockworker in late

nineteenth-century Stockholm with photos and

word-pictures to tell the story about what life

was like in that particular time and place. Laws

(1997) uses the space-time path of a woman’s

life course to show the changes in her residential

location and spatial mobility from childhood to

retirement. The life course diagram she con-

structed is a helpful visual device for telling

biographical stories.

While these attempts to re-present people’s

life histories used conventional media (printed

maps, diagrams, and pictures), geographers,

media artists, and community activists have

recently explored how geospatial technologies

such as GIS can be used to construct visual

narratives that tell stories about people’s lived

experiences (e.g., Brown and Knopp 2008;

Kwan 2002, 2007; Parks 2001). As GIS can

incorporate a variety of materials and data,

such as digital photos, video and voice clips,

subjects’ handwriting, hand-drawn maps and

other sketches collected through in-depth

interviews, the digital space afforded by GIS

can be used to re-present and interpret oral

and life histories (Kwan and Ding 2008). An

example of this use of GIS is the Ligon history

project, which seeks to preserve the history,

culture and memory of an inner-city high

school (J. W. Ligon High) in downtown

Raleigh (North Carolina, USA) (Alibrandi,

Thompson and Hagevik 2000). Besides doc-

umenting the African American perspective of

life during Ligon High School’s pre- and Civil

Rights eras, Alibrandi, Thompson and Hage-

vik (2000) used GIS to create a series of

historical life maps and construct a biographi-

cal narrative of an alumnus, whose daily life

paths were reconstructed from his memories.

In the above cases, spatial stories (de Certeau

1984) are told using the life path as a narrative

device. These stories are more expressive than

representational, presented not as objective

accounts but as interpreted visual narratives of

people’s experiences.

Enriching earlier work on GIS-based visual

narratives are studies that explore the use of

geospatial technologies as a medium for self-

expression and the articulation of emotional

geographies. For instance, I explored ways of

using moving images generated by GIS for

articulating people’s emotional geographies

(Kwan 2007). Drawing upon the methods in

visual ethnography, visual sociology and film

studies, I created a collaborative 3D GIS video

that is more an artistic and expressive visual

narrative than an objective recording gener-

ated with the aid of scientific visualization. I

suggested that GIS can be used to help ‘express

meanings, memories, feelings and emotions

for our subjects’ and we can ‘draw upon the

emotional power of moving images and the

techniques in narrative cinema to create GIS

movies or visualizations that tell stories about

the lives of marginalized people, highlight

social injustice and—we hope—effect social

change’ (Kwan 2007: 25).

Oral histories to visual narratives 659

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In the next section, I draw upon these

recent developments on constructing visual

narratives with geospatial technologies and

describe a method for telling the post-

September 11 story of a Muslim woman in

Columbus. This woman was a key infor-

mant of the study and will be referred to

here using the fictitious name Nada. Based

on her oral history and activity diary data, I

attempt to visually articulate her fear as she

traveled and undertook activities outside her

home since September 11 in a multimedia

3D GIS environment. I intend to expose the

silences and omissions of the dominant

master narrative that obfuscates the impact

of post-September 11 anti-Muslim hate

violence on her access to and use of public

spaces.

The story of a Muslim woman: a visual
narrative

Nada was born and grew up in Egypt. She

migrated to the USA 16 years ago with her

husband, who was then a graduate student

and is now working in an engineering firm as a

project manager. The couple, with three

children, speak Arabic at home and live in a

middle-class and largely White neighborhood

in Columbus. Her husband leads her sons to

perform the Islamic prayer and accompanying

ritual (bowing and kneeling) in an archway in

their house every evening when the call to

prayer comes off from a preset alarm clock.

Nada wears hijab and drives a minivan to

chauffeur her children to and from schools and

a variety of extra-curricular activities. She is a

‘stay-at-home mom’ and undertakes many

out-of-home activities in her daily life for the

family, including buying clothes for her

husband and driving her 13-year-old son to

soccer practices.

Nada’s household responsibilities make it

necessary for her to travel outside the home.

She has been wearing hijab since puberty.

Since September 11 she has not changed her

religious attire but has greatly reduced her out-

of-home activities and trips, especially in the

first few days after the attacks. One day several

months after September 11, I traveled with

Nada while she was driving her minivan to

undertake her normal out-of-home activities.

As we passed through various routes, she

recalled her feelings and fear when she saw

particular buildings or stores (and her oral

narrative was recorded). Using these audio

recordings (in the form of audio clips), the

textual transcripts of these recordings, the field

notes and photographs I took on that day,

Nada’s activity diary data and the map sketches

she completed during an interview, I constructed

a visual narrative that tells her story using

ArcScene (the 3D geovisualization environment

of ArcGIS).

The central element of the visual narrative is

Nada’s life paths for a ‘typical’ weekday

before and after September 11. They were

created using her activity data and a custom

algorithm I developed. They portray not only

the activity locations she visited and the routes

used to travel from one location to the next

but also the starting and ending time as well as

the duration and sequence of these activities

and trips. Nada’s life paths were color-coded

to reflect her sense of safety and the level of

fear she experienced as she moved over space

and visited different locations: red for ‘danger-

ous’, yellow for ‘not safe’, green for ‘moder-

ately safe’, and blue for ‘quite safe’. No

segment of her life paths was coded ‘very safe’

since Nada has never really felt that way as a

Muslim woman living in the USA. This coding

scheme, however, does not presume that a

person’s sense of safety or fear is mechanically

determined by the perceived or actual risk in

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the physical environment. As Koskela (1997:

304) suggests, ‘[F]eelings are not a mathemat-

ical function of actual risks but rather highly

complex products of each individual’s experi-

ences, memories and relations to space’ and it

‘must be accepted that feelings are not

measurable.’ Further, as Pain (2008) argues,

‘[F]ear is not simply reactive, but is situated in

complex individual and collective emotional

topographies and everyday experiences. We

should expect fear-provoking events and

discourse to be interpreted, resisted and

subverted by people in different ways.’ The

colors used to code Nada’s life paths are

merely one of the ways in which these paths

can be symbolically rendered for articulating

her emotional geographies. They are intended

to be expressive of her post-September 11

experiences rather than representational of

any observable or measurable ‘scientific’ facts.

In addition to Nada’s life paths, digital data

of several geographic features (e.g., buildings,

land parcels, rivers, and street networks) were

incorporated into the GIS database in order to

provide the background for the visual narra-

tive. Features identified on Nada’s sketches on

the map of the study area were also digitized

and incorporated in the GIS. Due to the need

to reduce computational intensity and

improve the speed in rendering the 3D scenes,

only geographic features in the relevant part of

the study area were rendered and colored (see

Figure 1). Further, qualitative materials col-

lected from Nada were linked to specific

segments or junctions of the life path. These

include photographs, voice clips from the

audio recordings, and excerpts from the

textual transcripts of her oral history. After

these materials were incorporated and linked

in the GIS database, symbolic and artistic

techniques were used to render 3D scenes that

express the changes in Nada’s sense of safety

and use of public spaces after September 11.

It should be noted, however, that the

illustrations in this article are static 2D screen

captures from a 3D interactive multimedia GIS

environment. These images are by no means

equivalent to the visual narrative constructed

using the multimedia environment. There are

thus obvious limitations in using these 2D

images to convey the expressive and emotional

power of GIS because they do not provide the

same range of sensory and interactive experi-

ence of a multimedia visual narrative created

using 3D GIS. To be able to appreciate how

GIS may help articulate emotional geogra-

phies, one needs some direct experience with

such a multimedia GIS environment instead of

looking at these 2D screen captures. Further,

the discussion below refers to the color version

of the figures available at ,http://geog-www.

sbs.ohio-state.edu/faculty/mkwan/VisNar.

html. .

Figure 1 shows Nada’s life path on a typical

weekday before September 11 and several

background geographic features rendered in

color (e.g., buildings, rivers, and the street

network). Her activities and trips proceed

from the bottom to the top along the temporal

axis (her stay at home is shown as two vertical

segments). The life path is coded blue to

suggest that Nada felt ‘quite safe’ but not ‘very

safe’ as she moved over space and visited

different locations even before September 11.

Her first out-of-home activity was dropping

off her daughter at an elementary school,

which is about ten minutes from home by car.

Nada would then return home and go to a

mosque to attend a Quran class before making

some shopping stops at various stores (e.g.,

grocery and department stores). After these

shopping trips, she would return home, pick

up her two sons at their middle schools, and

then stay at home for the rest of the day.

In the first few days after September 11,

Nada did not go out to perform any activity.

Oral histories to visual narratives 661

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The Quran classes at her mosque were

cancelled for several weeks. Her husband

temporarily helped chauffeur the children to

and from their schools. Nada had heard about

many anti-Muslim incidents in Columbus and

did not feel safe even when she was at home.

Some of her Muslim friends received death

threats or obscene messages on their answer-

ing machines. Apparently, there were people

who randomly identified Middle-Eastern

names in telephone directories, called the

numbers and left these messages. She heard

that some Muslim children were beaten up at

school. She knew that there was an arson

attack on a Muslim home that caused the

residents to be hospitalized. Nada has a CD-

ROM with photographs that show the

damage of the Islamic Foundation of Central

Ohio on Broad Street, which was vandalized

and incurred a US$100,000 loss. This incident

was very distressing to Nada, who also heard

about the profiling of Muslims and Muslim-

looking people at the Port Columbus Inter-

national Airport. People of color who look

like Muslims were searched and questioned

much more intensively than before September

11. This has led Nada to rule out air travel as a

viable means for out-of-town travel.

Figure 2 symbolically expresses Nada’s

feelings about Columbus and the impact of

her fear on her use of space. The entire area

was covered by a red surface—red is used to

represent the highest level of fear in this and

subsequent figures—and the vertical yellow

line represents her stay at home and lack of

mobility over time in this period. This line was

coded yellow (not safe) to represent a rather

high level of fear even when Nada was at

Figure 1 Nada’s life path on a typical weekday before September 11.

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home. As Nada recalled, she did not go

shopping as usual immediately after Septem-

ber 11, and the Quran classes at her mosque

were cancelled for several weeks for safety’s

sake. As a result of her fear of anti-Muslim

hate violence, Nada made adaptations to her

behavior that involved ‘self-imposed restric-

tions’ such as staying home and avoiding

certain parts of town (Pain 1991: 416). These

adaptations and precautions, however, had

adversely affected her personal freedom and

general quality of life.

Several days later, Nada’s fear decreased

somewhat. But she still remained at home most

of the time (represented by the vertical yellow

line; Figure 3). The lower level of fear she

experienced was symbolically represented by a

lowered surface (in red) that allows certain areas

to emerge as dangerous places, which mainly

include the Port Columbus International Air-

port (on the top left) and East Broad Street (the

linear 3D feature on the top right). Nada

perceived these two areas as particularly unsafe

largely due to the vandalism that occurred in the

Islamic Foundation of Central Ohio on East

Broad Street and the profiling incidents that

targeted Muslims and Muslim-looking people

at the airport. These two areas, delineated in

Nada’s sketches on the map of the study area

and being 2D geographic features originally, are

rendered as red 3D objects protruding from

below and rise above the lowered red surface.

This symbolizes the fear-provoking property of

these two areas.

Nada resumed most of her pre-September

11 routine activities several weeks later. But

her feelings about the public spaces in the

study area were not the same as before.

Figure 2 Nada’s life path immediately after September 11.

Oral histories to visual narratives 663

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As Koskela and Pain (2000: 278) emphasize,

‘[F]ear of crime influences the meaning of

place, as much as places influence fear.’ Nada

felt that no place besides her home was safe:

The safest place for me was home, and the most

uncomfortable places were public places . . . I try

not to get out of the car. If I have to go out I try not

to interact with people unless they start talking to

me. I was frustrated and scared and felt the same as

my kids. (Nada)

Although the anti-Muslim hate violence in

Columbus had abated somewhat, Nada still

did not want to go out. She, however, had

resumed some essential out-of-home activities.

For instance, Nada resumed dropping off or

picking up her daughter and sons at school.

But unlike what she used to do before

(like talking to some of the teachers or parents

of other school children), she stayed inside the

minivan and left the school once the children

got in the car. She resumed attending the

Quran classes at her mosque but exercised

extra caution. She felt more comfortable

shopping in a small ethnic grocery store close

to her home than in the big supermarkets and

department stores she used to frequent. But the

small grocer did not have all the things she

needed and she still had to go and shop in

those big stores. She was not comfortable in

dealing with the staff in these stores who may

be hostile to Muslims and she would try to find

a friendly person when she needed to check

out. As she recalled:

I didn’t let my feelings hold me back from doing my

regular activities. But there is no doubt that I wasn’t

Figure 3 Nada’s life path several days after September 11.

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feeling the same as before. At that time, I was

uncomfortable over the entire course of my

activities. I was trying to see if anyone would look

at me in a different way. It was very uncomfortable

but I kept going. (Nada)

The color-coded life path in Figure 4 expresses

Nada’s feelings and sense of safety at that time

(i.e., several weeks after September 11). She

felt that all shopping activities were dangerous

(red vertical segments) and there was no place

that she really felt very safe (hence, no segment

of her life path is coded ‘very safe’). Only when

she was at home (blue vertical segments) or

traveling inside her minivan (green segments)

that she considered herself quite safe (blue) or

moderately safe (green). Areas or urban

structures that Nada perceived as unsafe are

rendered as red 3D objects, which are now

clearly visible in the scene. These include the

Port Columbus International Airport (on the

top left), East Broad Street (the linear 3D

feature on the top right), and several depart-

ment stores, grocery stores, and other business

buildings (the two clusters of red 3D blocks in

the middle and lower left of the figure). With

the areas and urban structures perceived

unsafe symbolized in this manner, Figure 4

may be viewed as a portrayal of Nada’s

personal landscape of fear at that time.

Through this process of rendering Nada’s

life path and relevant geographic features and

incorporating other materials such as audio

clips and photographs in an interactive,

multimedia 3D GIS environment, I created

an expressive visual narrative that tells the

story of Nada’s post-September 11 experi-

ences. The central visual element of this

narrative is Nada’s life path, which temporally

organized her oral history and is color-coded

to reflect the level of fear and perceived danger

she experienced. In Figure 4, for instance,

green lines (moderately safe) were used to

represent the tiny comfort zones that Nada

experienced as she was traveling in her

minivan through the streets in Columbus;

while the exclusionary effect of the hostile

urban environment was symbolically rep-

resented by coloring particular buildings as

red 3D blocks. This visual narrative tells

Nada’s spatial story (de Certeau 1984) as she

recalled what happened to her life and how she

negotiated the hostile urban spaces after

September 11. It turns her oral history into

an expressive visual narrative based upon

her personal movements, memories, feelings

and emotions.

Conclusion

Binary construction of populations has been

the technology of government (in Foucauldian

terms) used by the Bush administration to

address the problem of security since

September 11. The dominant anti-Muslim

master narrative, however, has conflated the

Islamic faith with terrorism, where American

Muslims were constructed as anti-American

outsiders. Muslims and Muslim-looking people

in the USA have experienced a significant

increase in hate violence since September 11.

While this has deeply affected their lives, most of

their post-September 11 experiences have been

obfuscated by the muted response from the

media and the administration. In this article I

used a Muslim woman’s oral history to

construct a visual narrative that recovers part

of these experiences. I explored a way of telling

stories about these experiences as counter-

narratives using the expressive power of GIS.

Creating visual narratives, ‘is an intentional,

reflective, active human process in which

researchers . . . explore and make meaning of

experience both visually and narratively’ (Bach

2007: 281). As I suggest elsewhere, visual

Oral histories to visual narratives 665

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images, words and numbers can be used

together within the multimedia environment of

geospatial technologies to compose contextua-

lized visual narratives (Kwan 2002).

In identifying Muslim women as fearful

subjects, I challenge the dominant anti-

Muslim narrative that portrays them as

terrorists and anti-American foreigners. In

doing so I do not intend to construct Muslim

women or their responses to post-September

11 hate violence as a homogenous category.

Although anti-Muslim hate crimes are ram-

pant and the lives of American Muslims have

been deeply affected, the participants’ oral

histories revealed diverse experiences, reac-

tions, and coping strategies in relation to their

perceived threat of anti-Muslim hate violence.

They were not passive victims of the situation.

Some of them, for instance, reached out to the

non-Muslim population in Columbus and

presented knowledge about Islam in order to

counter the misunderstanding and negative

images of Islam portrayed by the media. This

effort was often supported by both Muslim

and non-Muslim organizations.

Some adopted a boldness strategy (Koskela

1997) and overcame their fear and continued

to undertake their normal daily activities and

trips. Although this strategy did not remove

the cause of their fear or reduce their risk, it

was less costly in terms of their freedom in

accessing and using public spaces—since

women’s self-imposed restrictions and ‘social

and lifestyle precautions . . . are most costly in

terms of personal freedom’ (Pain 1991: 420).

Despite the observation that participants’ fear

tends to be associated with public spaces and

that the socio-spatial restrictions many of

Figure 4 Nada’s life path several weeks after September 11.

666 Mei-Po Kwan

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them faced have been significant, I do not

intend to suggest that their experiences can be

generalized by some fixed or universalized

categories (see also the discussion in Koskela

1997, 1999; Pain 2001). The diversity in their

responses and strategies needs to be examined

carefully in order to provide a more nuanced

account of what happened to their lives since

September 11.

Acknowledgements

This project was supported by grants from the

Mershon Center for International Security

Studies and the Center for Urban and Regional

Analysis of the Ohio State University. Earlier

versions of this article were presented at the

2002 Annual Meeting of the Association of

American Geographers in Los Angeles and the

2005 Royal Geographical Society and Institute

of British Geographers Conference in London.

I thank the Muslim women who participated

in the study for their time and willingness to

share their experiences. I am grateful to three

anonymous reviewers for their helpful com-

ments and to Rob Kitchin, Deborah Dixon

and Mark Whitehead for their patience in the

process.

Note

1 It may be estimated that about 50 – 70% of Muslim

women adhere to the Islamic religious attire (that is,

wear loose-fitting outer-garment and the Muslim

headscarf (hijab) in public spaces and in the presence

of men outside the family) (Kwan and Ding 2008). I

recognize the diversity of experience and religious

practices among American Muslims (Aitchison, Hop-

kins and Kwan 2007; Kaya 2007; Moore 1998; Shakeri

1998). I do not intend to use hijab as a binary subject

indicator but foreground the importance of a visible

difference that often makes Muslim women more

vulnerable to discrimination and harassment in their

daily lives. Such a material difference not only can be

life-threatening to Muslim women but also is a critical

element in the process of their identity formation and

their subjectivities.

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Abstract translations

Des histoires orales aux récits visuels: la re-
présentation des expériences des femmes musul-
manes aux États-Unis au lendemain du 11
septembre

Depuis les attaques du 11 septembre 2001 dirigées
contre le World Trade Center de New York et le
Pentagone à Washington DC, les actes d’harcèlement
et de violence motivée par la haine que subissent les
Musulmans vivant aux États-Unis ou les personnes
qui leur ressemblent ont augmenté de façon marquée.
Les crimes de haine perpétrés contre les Musulmans
ont été lourds de conséquences pour ces personnes de
couleur. L’objectif de l’article est de récupérer une
partie des expériences vécues par des Américains de
confession musulmane au lendemain du 11 septembre
qui ont été escamotées par le grand récit dominant
anti-musulman qui faisait l’amalgame entre la foi
islamique et le terrorisme et construisait une image de
tous les Musulmans comme des étrangers anti-
Américains dangereux. Il est question d’examiner ici
la manière de raconter des histoires sur ces
expériences en ayant recours à la puissance expressive
des technologies géospatiales. À travers l’exemple des
expériences vécues par des femmes musulmanes de
Columbus (Ohio, États-Unis), les espaces technolo-
giques créés grâce aux systèmes d’information
géographique (SIG) peuvent servir à connaı̂tre
l’impact de la peur de la violence haineuse anti-
musulmane sur la vie quotidienne des femmes
musulmanes et à mieux articuler les éléments de leur

géographie émotionnelle en cette période de l’après
11 septembre.

Mots-clefs: violence haineuse anti-musulmane,
peur, technologies géospatiales, SIG, 11 septembre.

De historias orales a narrativas visuales: re-
presentando las experiencias de las mujeres
musulmanas en los Estado Unidos pos-11 de
septiembre

Desde los ataques contra el Centro de Comercio

Mundial de la ciudad de Nueva York y el Pentágono

en Washington DC el dı́a 11 de septiembre de 2001,

ha habido un incremento importante en hostili-

dades hacia y violencia de odio contra los

musulmanes y las personas con aspecto musulmán

en los Estados Unidos. Los delitos de odio

antimusulmán han afectado las vidas de estas

personas de color de manera significativa. En este

artı́culo intento recuperar parte de las experiencias

de los musulmanes estadounidenses pos-11 de

septiembre, las cuales quedaron confundidas por

la narrativa maestra predominante que era anti-

musulmán y que refundı́a el fé islámico con el

terrorismo y que representaba a todos los musul-

manes como peligrosos afueranos antiamericanos.

Exploro un modo de contar historias sobre estas

experiencias, empleando el poder expresivo de las

tecnologı́as geoespaciales. Utilizando como ejemplo

las experiencias de mujeres musulmanas en Colum-

bus (Ohio, EE.UU.), describo como se puede

emplear los espacios tecnológicos aportados por

los sistemas de información geográfica (SIG) para

esclarecer el impacto del temor a violencia de odio

antimusulmán sobre las vidas cotidianas de las

mujeres musulmanas y para ayudar a expresar sus

geografı́as afectivas en el perı́odo pos-11 de

septiembre.

Palabras claves: violencia de odio antimusulmán,
temor, tecnologı́as geoespaciales, SIG, 11 de
septiembre.

Oral histories to visual narratives 669

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