Becoming “Holistically Indigenous”: Young Muslims and Political Participation in Canada

While media and the government often focus on the supposed “radicalization” of Muslim youth in Canada, our research explores the more complicated and nuanced political identities among 20 young Canadian Muslims. Using semi-structured in-depth interviews with these youth in the Greater Toronto Area and in London, Ontario, we explore these young citizens' concepts of political participation; conceptions of the self as a political actor; formal, informal, and civic political involvement; and the relationship between their religious and Canadian identities. Our research is grounded in a positive and pluralistic politics of care, respect, and engagement. We treated Muslim youth as similar to other Canadian youth and designed our study guided by other contemporary research into Canadian youth and political participation. While our interviewees noted the impact of negative public discourse about Muslims and some experiences of racism, the research results revealed an overwhelming commitment to Canada and political engagement among Muslim youth, evidenced most fully by a high level of civic engagement

Securitising Citizenship: (B)ordering Practices and Strategies of Resistance

This article builds upon Yasemin Soysal's early work on post-national citizenship as constituting sites of resistance in contemporary European politics. Post-national citizenship provides every person with the right and duty of participation in the authority structures and public life of a polity, regardless of their historical ties to that community. This celebration of human rights as a world-level organising principle is, however, constantly challenged by liberal discourses and practices aimed to securitise identities and citizenships through the bordering of space, place and identities. Proceeding from a critical take on securitisation, we propose that in addition to a focus on the exceptional and on elite speech acts, we need to recognise that it is through everyday practices that people engage in (de)securitising strategies and practices that both rely upon and contest notions of belonging and borders. We exemplify by looking at two (diverse) minority communities in Britain and Canada that have been securitised at transnational, national and local levels, and study the extent to which we can see evidence of everyday resistance through the explicit or implicit use of desecuritising strategies. In both settings, the communities we study are young Muslims

RESPONSIBILITY, RECOGNITION AND REPRESENTATION: THE ETHICAL BASES OF TRUTH EVALUATION IN POLITICAL NARRATIVE ANALYSIS

Just as even the most personal of our narratives can ultimately be traced back to our communal pasts, so they are worked up, told, and retold through complex chains of sharing: Situated utterances, partial hearings and fractured representations circulate meanings and interpretations through relays of retelling as social agents listen to and tell their own and each other’s stories. Narrative political psychologists explore how the storied lives of political actors are both shaped by their historical and structured circumstances and reproduce their ongoing political agency. In such contexts, how do narrative political psychologists assess truth claims? Guided by a Critical Realist theoretical approach, the article sets out a series of considerations for the assessment of truth and facts. Three interrelated characteristics underpin the search for truth and meaning in political storytelling: Responsibility, Recognition and Representation, applied to the scientific community, research participants, and the broader polity, respectively. The article explores the ethical and practical implications of the three characteristics in the evaluation of truth claims across political narratives, highlighting both the quest for verifiable facts and the complexity and indeterminacy of the historical and cultural contexts in which truths emerge and are contested. Reference is made throughout to an empirical study of the narratives of members of a declining fraternal organization

Securitization through re-enchantment: The strategic uses of myth and memory

This article is an investigation into the attempt by the federal Conservative government of Stephen Harper to securitise the Canadian polity through re-enchantment. Through the strategic use of discourses and the shaping of the regime of signification, the article explains how the Harper government attempted to re-enchant national myths of Anglo-conformist nationalism, militarism and loyalism. Using discourse analysis of government documents and speeches, the article examines three sites of discursive intervention: (1) National Museum and Archive policy, specifically, the renaming of the Canadian national museum; (2) the militarisation and royalisation of national institutions and commemorations, notably the renaming of the Canadian navy and (3) the privileging of anglo-centric and loyalist tropes in the performance of citizenship rituals, and associated with this, reforming Citizenship legislation. The article concludes with an analysis of the reasons for the overall failure of the Conservative government’s attempts to securitise through re-enchantment