Examining the writings of prominent Islamist women intellectuals in Turkey, including Fatma Barbarosoğlu, Cihan Aktaş, Yıldız Ramazanoğlu, and Nazife Şişman, this article explores the repercussions of their intellectual activism for how scholars understand and study piety politics. These Islamist women intellectuals, whose discourse and subjectivities have been translated into analytical categories by scholars of piety politics, contest the terms of their encounters with academics and, more broadly, the conversion of Muslim women into objects of research. Their writings shed light on the complex interpretative interplay between academic and lay discourse when the objects of scholarly study speak back to social scientists. I argue that these kinds of critical engagements between Islamist women intellectuals and social scientific discourses attest to the mobility and circularity of social scientific categories, which have infused and reconstituted Islamist debates in Turkey. Rather than uncritically endorse or dispute these intellectuals’ interpretations of social scientific accounts, I leverage their claims to underscore the social life of academic discourse and to promote an enriched vision of piety politics and reflexive methodology.

What constitutes a quality research student learning experience? Using an interpretive social sciences approach, the tradition of autoethnography and the interpretive processes of reflexivity and constructivist grounded theory, the individual and collective lived research student experiences of three students were constructed/interpreted and (re)constructed/(re)interpreted to provide insights into answers to this question. Each student had completed one research program and, at the time of publication, was currently enrolled in a doctoral program. Based on these three students' autoethnographies, quality research student experiences engender personal, social, supervisor, research profession, learning communities and other life connectivities. These connectivities are generated through conducive conditions for learning, communities of practice and inclusive research cultures wherein research students experience and do research in order to become researchers, and to belong to research communities.