UM students launched a website Friday with video showing students and faculty from Taylor, Mississippi, to Jordan and Azerbaijan in departments across campus describing their experiences as Muslims at Ole Miss.
OpenMISS, developed by 13 students as a class project, is a website highlighting local Muslim communities. Its goal is to celebrate the diverse Muslim culture in Oxford and promote an inclusive society.
Adham Hagag and Katie Johnston with Open Miss discuss the organization’s current status and its plans for the future. Photo by: Timothy Steenwyk
The site’s first student-submitted article traces elements of readers’ daily lives back to their origins in ancient Muslim civilizations. Project Coordinator Katie Johnston said the team is currently working on in-depth profiles of prominent local Muslims.
“What we want to do with this project is really sort of a social media campaign,” Johnston said. “So, this way we can engage with students across the board on campus, and, hopefully, it will trickle out into the Oxford community as well.”
The Intelligence and Security Studies class is one of roughly 90 teams participating in an international competition sponsored by the Department of State called Peer to Peer: Challenging Extremism. The contest requires student-led teams to formulate strategies and narratives to counter the rhetoric and misconceptions around violent extremism.
At the end of the semester, top teams will present their campaigns in Washington, D.C., and receive scholarships up to $5,000.
Each team is granted a $2,000 budget to execute its project over the course of a semester. The OpenMISS team has spent roughly $600 of that budget so far, primarily on setting up the website and commissioning UM students to generate content for the website.
Johnston said she hopes the program will continue on campus and that its cost efficiency will make it a good model for other campuses.
In February, Johnston reached out to Adham Hagag, UM Muslim Student Association president, for assistance with the project. Hagag said he was glad to help, viewing the goals of OpenMISS as similar to those of his organization.
Hagag has been at the University for more than five years. He is now pursuing his doctorate in electrical engineering. In his four years of working with UM MSA, Hagag has had experience countering misinformation about Islam.
“Most people think that Muslims are all Arabs or Muslims have the same culture and traditions, and that’s a common mistake,” Hagag said. “We try to raise awareness about the importance of respecting diversity and others on campus.”
Hagag said Oxford’s Muslim community is diverse because of individuals coming from all over the world to the University, but Muslim students are just like any other students on campus.
“People are all people,” Hagag said. “All people are different in what they believe and how they dress, but they are all people. If you have a Muslim friend, he’ll be just like any other friend.”
Melissa Graves, interim director of the UM Center for Intelligence and Security Studies and the course’s instructor, said the class came together unexpectedly. A former UM CISS colleague told Graves he noticed the University on the list of participants.
“He thought it was the center, and it wasn’t,” Graves said. It was a marketing class.”
The marketing professor registered for the contest had to cancel, and the center filled that spot.
“The timing was really weird and wonderful,” Graves said.
The center then recruited Bryan McCloskey, senior supervisory resident agent at the FBI satellite office in Oxford, as a contractor to help with the course. Graves said she wanted this course to be built on professional experience.
“He places a lot of the responsibility on the students,” Graves said. “He’s really good at moderating conversations among the students, but it’s not a lecture course. It’s very much ‘Let’s talk about these issues and what are your ideas?'”
Graves said the group’s inclusive approach works to combat misconceptions about intelligence work and what it means to be Muslim in Mississippi.
“Muslims are the people that we work with, they’re the people we go to school with, they’re as Southern as you or I,” Graves said. “It’s just a dimension a lot of people don’t immediately associate with the University of Mississippi or Oxford. I think changing that and opening peoples’ eyes to the fact that these aren’t just people we hear about in the news. These people are our classmates. That’s a really good message.”
