61 research outputs found

    Muslims in Public and Media Discourse in Western Europe: The Reproduction of Aporia and Exclusion

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    This chapter scrutinizes the dominant public discourse in Western Europe. Drawing on examples from the UK, Germany, and France but also from the Netherlands, Denmark and Spain it illustrates the gradual transformation of discourse from an “exotic Islam” to a “threatening Islam” that endangers European values and safety and suggests that the combination of this “securitization” of Islam and the monopoly of the “Muslim voice” by radical Muslim activists leads to a vicious circle of misrecognition and enhancing the aporia of Europe's Muslims

    European Muslim Diasporic Geographies: Media Use and the Production of Translocality

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    This article, based on extensive fieldwork among Muslim communities in five western European countries, explores the ways in which European Muslims ‘situate’ themselves emotionally, culturally and politically vis-à-vis fellow Muslims in Europe and the Muslim world. Drawing on theories of space, place and identity, the article examines processes that amount to the construction of translocal/transnational phenomenological geographies through the utilization of time/space distanciating technologies to cultivate long-distance relations that are crucial to the identification process of European Muslims. Through these they engage in processes of cultural negotiation and translation, of forging of local and translocal links and solidarities that rest on making cognitive and emotional investments and thereby constructing and disseminating narratives shared among themselves and other Muslims

    The Politics of Identity: Nationalism & National Identity in Contemporary Greece

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    Beyond the concept of diaspora? Re-evaluating our theoretical toolkit through the study of Muslim transnationalism

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    Europe’s Muslims, especially those who have migrated to the continent and their offspring, have largely been engaging in a long process that involves the adaptation of their communities to their new societies, to new ways of dealing with social issues and challenges while they have also tried to sustain and reproduce distinctive cultural values in a non-Muslim setting. What is quite interesting and pertinent as far as this chapter is concerned is that, in many cases, they have been doing so in the company of fellow Muslims whose practices originated in homelands different from theirs. Despite this diversity, their shared experiences have produced some commonalities in their engagement with the Islamic tradition and their modalities of creating their cotemporary communities. They have, moreover, not negotiated such issues in isolation: Muslims today are tied together globally through a range of institutions and media (Tsagarousianou 2007 and 2013), so much so that we can no longer ignore the conceptual move “from the more essentialist notions of a concrete homeland, national or ethnic identity and geographical location to deployments of the notion of diaspora conceptualized in terms of transnationality, imagination, ambivalence, hybridity or mestisage and heterogeneity”

    Diaspora as Frame: How the notion has reshaped migration studies

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    The chapter traces the career of the concept of diaspora since its inception and early usage in the 1980s to date and attempts to examine its role as a (re)framing tool in the context of the study of migration. It is argued that the notion of diaspora shifted the ways immigration was conventionally looked at by economists and policy makers at the time of the post-war take off of the European and transatlantic economies. Its impacts, it will be suggested, were manifold: the diasporic turn  shifted interest from seeing migrants as temporary (an effect of the guest worker mentality of the post WWII era) to looking at migrant communities as durable social phenomena, made it possible to examine the complex web of interactions among migrants locally and transnationally, allowed social scientists to focus on the social experiences that created and sustained different migrant networks and communities and it challenged the ethnocentrist implicit in earlier migration studies. Finally, the paper points out that in this context, the concept of diaspora opened up avenues for the exploration of the nature of transnationality, connectivity and communication as key domains of diasporic interaction and narrative production in ways that have enhanced our understanding of interconnectedness in an increasingly and rapidly globalizing world

    'God, patria and home': ‘reproductive politics’ and nationalist (re)definitions of women in East/Central Europe

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    I argue that through complex processes of social construction of gender, women in East/Central European societies are seen primarily as reproducers of the nation. One effect of such definitions is the enforcement of reproductive policies which amount to the nationalization of female bodies. After a brief assessment of reproductive policies during the state‐socialist period, an overview of the contemporary debate within the post‐communist universe of discourse, and of the policies enacted by the new East/Central European regimes, I argue that within the framework of the emerging masculinist cultures in East/Central Europe, masculinity becomes increasingly identified with the public domain; in contrast, women are progressively confined within the ‘private’ sphere, identified with holding the primary responsibility for the family. Definitions of femininity along these lines have been influenced by the emergence of a particular form of ‘reproductive politics’ supported by post‐state‐socialist movements stressing the right of the nation to mobilize all of its resources, and thus, to subjugate women for the ‘national good’
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