"Home is gone" The desire to Belong and the Renegotiation of Home (original) (raw)
Related papers
Young people with muslim backgrounds exploring their multiple sense of belonging
2017
In this article, I discuss the performative, art-based, and participatory methods used in two major research projects conducted with immigrant youth in Finland: Since 2009, I have been engaged in the participatory performative research project “A Finn, a Foreigner, or a Transnational Hip-hopper? Participatory Art-Based Research on the Identification Negotiations and Belongings of Second-Generation Finnish Immigrant Youth”, and in 2016, I began to work as a researcher for a project called “Young Muslims and Resilience—A Participatory Study.” I also discuss the roles that participatory performative research approaches play in these projects. I begin by briefly discussing my own positionings as a researcher and by introducing the main data, materials, productions, and themes that emerged from the data. I then reflect on the methodological foundation of these projects. Finally, I discuss how young people have negotiated their belonging through multiple identifications and relations to r...
We seek contributions for a special section of Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory on movement and home-making among Muslims living in the diaspora, and on the ways in which faith may underpin individual and communal understandings of these phenomena. In the context of migration for diverse reasons, including education and as refugees, and the often negative and homogenizing portrayals of Muslims in the media, we focus on the differences across particular Muslim groups and their varied aspirations. We seek to shed new light on how experience in the present is shaped by faith, by the past, and by hopes for the future. Places left behind, as sites of exclusion and exile, or because they no longer offer viable futures for those who dwell there, invoke ideas of home as refuge, of center and origin, even as one moves away, geographically and across time, from places considered as home. This special issue considers how Muslim communities incorporate diverse and complex histories of travel and displacement into practices reestablishing home and reinventing everyday life in new locations. We seek to understand how experiences of migration are understood in relation to a faith which orders and shapes experience. How do ideas of places of origin, however imagined in new contexts, interact with the locations to which particular Muslim groups journey and in which they establish their lives, to create identities that may be conceptualized as unchanging in spite of altered circumstances? Forced migration is strongly tied to the postcolonial reality of much of the Muslim world and hence to the socio-historical processes that have influenced and shaped diverse conceptions of home and home-making
Islamic identity and its role in the lives of young Swedish Muslims
Abstract This paper concerns the level of wellbeing experienced by Swedish Muslim youths and young adults as well as the ways in which this is influenced both positively and negatively by their sense of Islamic religious identity. Taking Akerlof and Crantons’ Treatise on “identity economics” as its point of departure, the paper explores, discusses and analyses the following two questions: (1) what are the contexts in which identification with Islam tends to facilitate the wellbeing of Swedish Muslim youths and young adults; and (2) what are the contexts in which identification with Islam tends to destabilize (or increase the sociocultural discomfort of) this same group. Here, the notion of Islam as a “resource” is important, since this underlines its potential to resolve the types of existential dilemmas that are often found to confront the young and undermine their sense of wellbeing. The paper bases its assessments on the results of a questionnaire concerning life, values, relations, leisure time activities and religion that was distributed to a total of 4,000 young Swedes, a certain number of whom identified themselves as “Muslims”. Apart from studying the survey’s Muslim-specific results, I have conducted a number of additional interviews with young Muslim respondents, aiming to extend our understanding beyond the strictly quantitative findings of the material. The survey indicates that, much like their Christian counterparts, a majority of the Muslim respondents considered their belief in Islam to be a private, personal matter; one-third described themselves as “seekers”—an identification that previous research has found to be associated primarily with secular majority youth. The results further indicate that a majority of Muslim youths have a low level of confidence in religious leaders and that very few are actively involved in mosque activities and the like; on the contrary, they prefer to spend their leisure hours earning money, being with friends and/or “working out” at the gym. While the survey found that the vast majority of Muslim respondents looked upon the social and spiritual dimensions of Islam as a positive resource, the interviews indicate that the ability of young Muslims to appropriately shift between different forms of cultural belonging is highly advantageous as well.
HAU - Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2024
This is the introduction to the second part of a special section that spans two issues of HAU (14 [1] AND 14 [2]). The articles in the special section focus on home and home-making and all that this entails for Muslims who have left their homes or cannot be fully at home in their home places. Across countries and continents, across sects and in different local contexts, with diverse histories of migration, the articles explore what home is and what it means, as a material place in lived experience and as an imaginary place, often remembered or felt as loss. Home is an ideal underpinned by home-making practices and experiences, and thus by affect, dispositions, and emotions. As a consequence, home is always structured and embodied, but also a creative and dynamic act of dwelling.
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2024
Here we introduce a special section that spans this and the next issue of HAU. The articles in the section focus on home and home-making and all that this entails for Muslims who have left their homes or cannot be fully at home in their home places. Across countries and continents, across sects and in different local contexts, with diverse histories of migration, the articles explore what home is and what it entails, as a material place in lived experience and as an imaginary place, often remembered or felt as loss. Home is an ideal underpinned by home-making practices and experiences, and thus by affect, dispositions, and emotions. Thus, home is always structured and embodied, but also a creative and dynamic act of dwelling.
HAU - Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2024
The articles in the special section focus on home and home-making and all that this entails for Muslims who have left their homes or cannot be fully at home in their home places. Across countries and continents, across sects and in different local contexts, with diverse histories of migration, the articles explore what home is and what it means, as a material place in lived experience and as an imaginary place, often remembered or felt as loss. Home is an ideal underpinned by home-making practices and experiences, and thus by affect, dispositions, and emotions. As a consequence, home is always structured and embodied, but also a creative and dynamic act of dwelling. Keywords: home, home-making, Muslims, diaspora, religion, faith
Faith and place: constructing Muslim identity in a secular Lutheran society
cultural geographies, 2012
Non-Christian immigrants coming to Sweden encounter a mainly secular society with a strong Lutheran heritage, as physically symbolized by the more than 3500 church towers scattered throughout the country, often in central locations in cities and villages. In this landscape dotted with Christian landmarks, there are few visible physical spaces linked to the identity of Muslim immigrants. The aim of this article is to analyse the religious and cultural significance that Muslim immigrants attach to the presence or absence of mosques in their neighbourhood. Drawing upon a conceptual framework that distinguishes between physical, mental and social space, the analysis focuses on the meaning of place and the identity attached to the mosques. The empirical basis for the study includes interviews with imams complemented by articles and other written materials published in newspapers and on the internet. In the concluding section, we return to and reflect upon our overarching question: the re...
2018
This thesis explores the lives of young adults (18-25-year-old) who identify as Muslim in Copenhagen and Montreal. As a comparative ethnography, it sets out to examine the transatlantic similarities and differences among young people who grew up in an era where Muslims were often represented as a foreign object in need of integration, and at times as threatening. The thesis investigates processes of representation depicting young Muslims’ life histories, social positions and social identifications. Furthermore, it follows these young individuals’ movements through their cities and the spatial narratives they construct through these movements. I have sought to unravel the complexity of my interlocutors’ self-ascribed identifications of Muslim and Copenhagener/Montrealer – as well as the many other identifications they adopted - by furnishing their narratives with spatial representations; in many ways, these young people were shaped by and shaped the social spaces they inhabit. In so ...
Muslim identity The European context Sussex Migration Working Paper no . 34
2006
Islam is a minority religion in Europe; however, the number of Muslims is rapidly increasing and with this increase comes the issue of Muslim identity and what it means to a 'new look' Europe. Muslims like people in other religious groups come from different nationalities, social backgrounds and economic levels. Yet in countries across Europe, Muslims have established a common community, because of their 'affiliation' to Islam; their religion is their identity. Identity is an issue fundamental to all our lives. Each one of us is a complex collection of loyalties, associations, beliefs and personal perspectives. However, for many, the question of identity may seldom cause personal conflict or trauma as people live within established communities with shared beliefs and perspectives. For others, particularly those who live in fragmented communities or belong to minority or marginalised groups as in the case of the religious minority group discussed here it may be a ques...
Poster Children of Integration and the Question of Being a “Good Danish Muslim”
Tidsskrift for Islamforskning, 2017
This article explores the intersection of subjectivity construction among Muslim youth with Danish welfare state governmentality. More specifically, it looks at campaigns in which successful professionals and students of non-Western descent, primarily Muslims, are used strategically as role models to target ethnic minorities in general, and Muslims in particular. By communicating their life stories, the role models become real life examples of successful integration meant to inspire others to follow their path. Thus the campaigns are a part of the prevalent discourse that views minorities (i.e. non-Danish and non-Christian) as particularly problematic to integrate and therefore needing special attention for becoming “compatible” with the values of the Danish welfare state. Taking its departure in these campaigns and applying a governmentality-inspired approach, this paper seeks to investigate normative state-prescribed forms of being a “good Danish Muslim.” It analyses how this imag...