This presentation draws upon qualitative material obtained for a PhD project which considers how Sudanese women’s lives in the “new” city of Portsmouth (UK) become spatially and temporally ordered through the seemingly mundane everyday spaces they inhabit. More specifically, this presentation focuses on Sudanese women’s practices of ‘staying in’ by drawing upon information obtained from interviews with Sudanese women and observations of their everyday practices of ‘homemaking’ in Portsmouth. Through a postcolonial feminist lens, I will suggest that Sudanese women’s movements and experiences in the city are shaped by multiple matrices of power (gendered, raced, classed and sexualised). More particularly, I will examine how gendered expectations of wifehood and motherhood interact with classed and raced subjectivities to influence the (im)mobility of Sudanese women in the urban landscape.  As the city becomes a vehicle of assimilatory subject-making, I will reiterate the work of other postcolonial feminist geographers by illustrating the potential for ‘home’ (that is the domestic space) to be an important ‘safe space’ of comfort and respite from the often challenging public spaces of the city, and/or a site of empowerment and resistance for Sudanese women in Portsmouth. In so doing, I will challenge dominant discourse in Britain that ‘Muslim women’ are passive, immobile and trapped in domestic spaces.

Charlotte is a second year PhD candidate at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter (UK). Charlotte holds a BA (Combined Honours) in Arabic and French, an MA in Middle East and Islamic Studies and an MRes in Middle East and Islamic Studies. Charlotte is currently pursuing her PhD with funding from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council. Charlotte’s PhD thesis aims to provide a feminist postcolonial critique of the discourse of “integration” – particularly Muslim women’s integration - in Britain, through on-the-ground ethnographic research with Sudanese women in her home-town of Portsmouth.