When race, gender, and religion meet: Muslim women academics’ experiences of racism in Belgian and Dutch academia

This chapter examines the experiences of Muslim women academics in Belgium and the Netherlands, focusing on how anti-Muslim racism, gendered racialization, and secular whiteness shape their academic trajectories. While public debates and restrictive legislation in both countries frequently target Muslim women—framing them as symbols of failed integration—this chapter highlights how these exclusionary narratives extend into academia. Despite the formal acceptance of religious expression in universities, dominant secular norms construct (visibly) Muslim women as incompatible with neutrality, objectivity, and academic authority. Drawing on interviews, the chapter explores how Muslim women navigate and resist these exclusions through strategies of concealment, hypervisibility, and resistance. Their experiences reveal how anti-Muslim racism intersects with migration status and non-belonging, demonstrating that racialized exclusion persists across generations. The analysis challenges assumptions that academia is a progressive and inclusive space and instead shows how secular whiteness continues to govern institutional belonging. By foregrounding the embodied experiences of exclusion and resistance, this chapter contributes to migration and gender studies by illustrating the structural barriers Muslim women academics face and the ways they challenge these constraints to reimagine academia otherwise.