In nearly two years at NYU Abu Dhabi, between cups of chai, group hugs at the end of a long week or along the rumbling of 1 a.m. Corniche tides, I’ve grown to openly acknowledge, accept and confront myself, my beliefs and my experiences. But through all of this, I was surrounded by some of the women who are now my closest friends. As young women, when we come together over our shared identities and experiences, there is a sense of security that is essential in allowing us to understand ourselves. More importantly, it allows us to do so on our own terms, while not being subject to the insecurity of living in a world structured along power dynamics and social positionalities that dictate so much of who we are. This is essential in allowing us to explore and accept our womanhood at a crossroads of all else that we identify ourselves with.

In cultivating these spaces, there is a profound reclamation of our agency. Personal friendships have deeply informed my experience in college, but so have spaces formed for women on campus, such as the Women’s Leadership Network and weSTEM.

More formal than a friend group, these groups are an organic extension of the need to imagine female empowered spaces. I think it is tied to our experience of the world as women and of making spaces for ourselves where they don’t traditionally exist.

“In order to belong somewhere as someone from marginalized communities, it is important to be able to find a community that is affinity based and strengthening from within … Finding community has to be in affinity and in solidarity,” Assistant Director of Student Activities and First Year Experience Sara Amjad explained.

Simran Parwani, Class of 2021 and President of weSTEM, highlighted their goals and targets. “We want weSTEM to be a community of people who empower each other … A lot of our male identifying peers don’t care because they don’t have to. For us, it is a matter of creating a safe space for ourselves and trying to improve the culture across the institution.”

AZIZA is a student-led organization that centers global black women and gender marginalized people at NYUAD and in the greater Abu Dhabi area. “What we are aiming for is an opportunity for a private space, which in turn creates a safe space,” explained Furqan Mohamed, a student leader for AZIZA from the Class of 2022.

AZIZA’s work extends past NYUAD to the greater Abu Dhabi community. The goal, as Mohamed explained, is for every black woman and gender marginalized person in Abu Dhabi to both know that there is a community that they are welcomed in and use the resources that they provide and cultivate.

“One of the most powerful ways of doing that is through building community with people who experience life similar to yourself, while leaving space to interrogate the spaces where there might be difference[s],” Mohamed described.

WeSTEM aims to provide resources, opportunities and programming for women and nonbinary people interested in STEM careers. Through operationalizing more inclusive language and forming more specific, intersectional, identity based affinity groups, the organization is building open, accessible spaces to engage students, especially reflected in their thriving Slack community. In doing so, it is empowering members to explore their lived experiences at the crossroads of their gender, ethnic or national identity and take charge of their academic interests and trajectories.

Also embodying intersectionality, AZIZA outlined their commitment to provide a safe and inclusive space for gender marginalized people and changed their community guidelines to reflect the same in 2020. These organizations are doing critical work in terms of inclusion, diversity, belonging and equity.

And it is not just students who are tackling issues affecting females and gender minorities. Saba Brelvi, longtime NYUAD community member, advocates for the domestic staff on campus to be increasingly integrated with campus life and opportunities.

“If the institution isn’t willing to fundamentally look at the ways that some groups of people, who are women and women of color who are at the very bottom in terms of pay, access to opportunity, life trajectory, then I don’t think that we are doing a great job around diversity and equity … Along with decolonizing the curriculum, ensuring a diverse faculty and staff, you actually have to look at the class and economic inequality that we perpetuate on this campus,” Brelvi explained.

With this recognition, in 2012, Brelvi started to organize for ethical, responsible employment policy and regulations for domestic staff. Beyond advocacy, Brelvi creates programming, provides resources and improves accessibility to campus spaces for the all female domestic worker staff. For Brelvi, one meaningful moment involved organizing an open space to talk about women’s health, allowing participants to sit together, ask questions and explore the often unaddressed — sometimes tabooed — experiences of living in a female body, often without awareness and access to preventative health care.

“This community of women really are their own safety net.”

Maintaining these spaces is also a feminist undertaking. It’s an expression of sisterhood and solidarity, but also one that requires extensive emotional labor.

Brelvi is a singular organizer for domestic staff on campus, with the mantle of some of the work taken up by the Office of Social Responsibility. This seems to be the case for student leaders as well. Rameen Mahmood, Class of 2023 and co-president of weSTEM, expressed, “There’s a lot of emotional labor that goes into weSTEM.”

Parwani explained that in light of growing expectations of the SIG from the community, “I could do weSTEM as a full time job and still run out of time … You always feel like you’re not doing enough no matter what. And so, we have to manage our own expectations too.”

Last year, Tatyana Brown, Class of 2022 and founder of AZIZA, wrote an article about the labor required as a black woman organizer on campus and reflected on institutional expectations and abandonment.

“There are so many resources available that offer tangible ways to do better,” explained Mohamed, especially after the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement that resurged this past summer. “I think that there is a multitude of options available to the administration and it is not necessarily a student led organization’s responsibility to make that happen.”

In the fall of 2019, the posters for the Women’s Leadership Network’s Annual Conference were torn off repeatedly in multiple locations, in what felt no less than targeted antagonism to the conference, its principles and the group. In the aftermath, the organizers were met with concern for their mental health and were offered emotional support.

But, as Ana Blatnik, Class of 2022 who was chairing the conference that semester, expressed: “We really just wanted some institutional help and support from their level.” Women and the gender nonconforming populace are already disproportionately burdened with the task of advocating for and empowering their colleagues and peers, even outside of university circumstances. In their attempt to address the gaps in our specific community, these groups have also had to figure out how to navigate the layered complexities of NYUAD’s diversity.

To Brelvi, it is clear that NYUAD must go the extra mile in providing certain spaces, opportunities and resources that are not accessible by default: “If you want those services to be provided, you might have to think about your own part in making them happen.”

“Yet, for an institution that prides itself being on the vanguard of so many issues in the region, I think they are doing some but could be doing so much more,” Brelvi concluded.

For Blatnik, NYUAD needs to meet the expectations of community members by more active support. “Make it seem like you genuinely have something at stake in educating students about gender equality.”

“There is always space to center us more. There just always is,” Mohamed emphasized, in regards to black women and gender minorities.

While not all these spaces are created equal, they have an indispensable impact in equalizing the uneven terrain for women and gender minorities in college communities. While discussing this piece with a friend, we ended up discussing the possibility of a resource center for women and gender marginalized people on campus, an overarching community that institutionalizes the spirit of community care and openness.

Brelvi reflected on the importance of having a women’s center during her own undergraduate career, emphasising on the ease of accessibility to a safe space, resources and the active, intentional presence of an emotional support network. “It was literally a building that was a women’s only space. That was 25 years ago; now, they’d definitely use more inclusive language. It was the place that you could come and be in conversation with other women, students, staff or faculty.”

The diversity of NYUAD is one of the many privileges received as part of our education. As students, it is our privilege to be able to take up the charge in navigating what that means for our community. Yet, that does not mean that the burden of doing so lies squarely on the shoulders of those who choose to identify the gaps and put in the time, labor and emotional investment to intentionally create spaces that fill them. Community building is community driven, but is it worth considering if it is too much of a task to do so without broader directives and support?

In Parwani’s words: “It’s one of those double-edged swords of attending such a young, entrepreneurial institution like NYUAD where so much of the labor is put on students but which also gives students a lot of empowerment to make change. What does a balance look like between those two aspects?”