The "Then" and "Now" politics of fear: A multilingual intimate duo-ethnography at the crossroads of language, religion, immigration, and education

This temporal multilingual intimate dual and duoethnography in education forwards duoethnography as an affective and temporal inquiry and explores how fear, language, religion, and immigration shape the lived and scholarly experiences of two immigrant women—one from Syria and one from Germany, working within U.S. educational contexts. Organized through Then and Now, not as a linear chronology but through felt time, this work constitutes a methodological and emotional movement between our research studies and the personal, political, and relational dimensions of our lives and our languages. We highlight how a duoethnographic approach offers methodological hope amid heightened fear and anti-immigration rhetoric that is anti-Muslim, anti-Black, and anti-Arab. The first study examines Arab immigrant women's educational experiences through a transnational Arab feminist lens, while the second centers Black immigrant women through a transnational Black feminist approach. Through friendship and dialogue, we trace how fear weaves through our research, writing, and ways of being. Our duoethnographic method becomes both a site of resistance and healing, revealing how intimacy, affect, and multilingual relationality can trespass the rigid boundaries of educational research and reimagine education as a deeply human and interconnected space. This work challenges the individualistic knowledge logics of the U.S. academy by centering intimacy and relationality across differences, mobilizing connection to confront the structures of fear that govern language and education in the United States. Through multi-layered duo-ethnography, we show how our research stories interconnect, capturing the intimacies of lived experiences that are rife with systemically imposed fear. We start this manuscript by introducing our affective states through a temporal representation of the "Then" and "Now" feelings as immigrant women scholars navigating U.S. educational contexts-feelings offered not as confession but as methodological testimony to the affective economies (Ahmed, 2004) that govern our multilingual lives.