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Encountering misrecognition : being mistaken for being Muslim

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Date
2017
Author
Hopkins, Peter
Botterill, Katherine
Sanghera, Gurchathen
Arshad, Rowena
Funder
Arts and Humanities Research Council
Grant ID
Keywords
Race
Islamophobia
Encounters
Geopolitics
Identity
H Social Sciences
GF Human ecology. Anthropogeography
JZ International relations
NDAS
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Abstract
Exploring both debates about misrecognition and explorations of encounters, this paper focuses upon the experiences of ethnic and religious minority young people who are mistaken for being Muslim in Scotland. We explore experiences of encountering misrecognition, including young people’s understandings of, and responses to, such encounters. Recognising how racism and religious discrimination operate to marginalise people – and how people manage and respond to this – is crucial in the struggle for social justice. Our focus is upon young people from a diversity of ethnic and religious minority groups who are growing up in urban, suburban and rural Scotland, 382 of whom participated in 45 focus groups and 224 interviews. We found that young Sikhs, Hindus and other South Asian young people as well as Black and Caribbean young people were regularly mistaken for being Muslim. These encounters tended to take place at school, in taxis, at the airport and in public spaces. Our analysis points to a dynamic set of interconnected issues shaping young people’s experiences of misrecognition across a range of mediatised, geopoliticised and educational spaces. Geopolitical events and their representation in the media, the homogenisation of the South ‘Asian’ community and the lack of visibility offered to non-Muslim ethnic and religious minority groups all worked to construct our participants as ‘Muslims’. Young people demonstrated agency and creativity in handling and responding to these encounters including: using humour; clarifying their religious affiliation; social withdrawal and ignoring the situation. Redressing misrecognition requires institutional change in order to ensure parity of participation in society.
Citation
Hopkins , P , Botterill , K , Sanghera , G & Arshad , R 2017 , ' Encountering misrecognition : being mistaken for being Muslim ' , Annals of the American Association of Geographers , vol. 107 , no. 4 , pp. 934-948 . https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2016.1270192
Publication
Annals of the American Association of Geographers
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2016.1270192
ISSN
2469-4452
Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2016 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis, LLC © P. Hopkins, K. Botterill, G. Sanghera, and R. Arshad. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
This research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (reference number AH/K000594/1).
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URL
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24694452.2016.1270192
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/10386

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