Salma Ibrahim is a fourth year Sociology major and Biological Science minor, and completed a certificate from the Peter Lougheed Leadership College last year. Her paper “Religion and the Law: Bill 21 and its Dysfunctionalities'' was published in the PSUR’s Special Edition: The Charter at Forty. We sat down with Salma to learn more about the contemporary relevance of her article, the process of being published in a peer-reviewed journal, and her advice for students considering submitting their own work.
The Special Edition allowed submissions of papers that were written in non-Political Science courses if they related to the Charter. What inspired the topic of your paper?
This was a term paper that I did for Soc 429 (Sociology of Law) where we looked at how the law interacts with different aspects of our lives. I specifically chose law and religion, because I was really looking forward to writing about Bill 21, which is the bill in Quebec that is known to restrict the wearing of religious symbols, turbans, skullcaps, and hijabs. As a Muslim woman who wears hijab myself, I really wanted to look at that. Especially because around the time that I was writing it in Winter 2021, there was a spike in the City of Edmonton in hate crimes and physical violence towards Muslim women wearing the hijab, so I thought that a good topic for the paper would be to look at how hijab interacts with the law and the freedom to practice religion in Canada. Some might say that it’s a sensitive topic, but I think it’s a topic that’s really worth exploring.
What was the most interesting thing you learned from researching your paper?
What struck me most in my research about the bill was that school teachers counted as public servants. I was reading stories about hijabi women or women who wore turbans and how they had just graduated from their teaching programs to work in Quebec but wouldn’t be able to get a job after all those years of education and training. As a hijabi myself, I can sympathize deeply with them, but being far away from where that bill is taking place, it sort of puts some distance. Through researching this I understood more about what’s going on to other girls like me, my own sisters from other places.
How would you describe the peer-review process?
This process was very intimate - there were two peer review stages where they read through my entire essay word for word, giving me suggestions of what to add, what to move, different ways of wording things. It was very in-depth and I was grateful for that. I tried to take all of their ideas and mesh them together to make some of the edits. One of my goals has always been to work on my writing and I deeply wanted to make this paper as good as it could be, so I’m really thankful for them going over it. At the end of the day, the suggestions that they gave me only made my writing more powerful.
What would you say to someone who is considering submitting their work to the PSUR?
I would say don’t doubt yourself and your writing capabilities. It can be intimidating to send in something for other people to read outside of class, but it’s worth it. It’s really good to try and get something published while you’re still in your undergrad, and I hadn’t learned about it until near the end - for me, getting published before I graduate was such a treat. If you want you can always talk to your professor first who knows the assignment very well or utilize the writing centre on campus. I was very hesitant to submit my paper, thinking maybe it wouldn’t be good enough, but I believed in it and knew there was value to it. Send it in, what’s the worst that could happen?
Want to submit your essay to the PSUR? Find more information on our website.