The meeting willstart with intrductions and updates.

Miriam Jawadi, "Constructing Islam on Social Media: Populist Discourses about Islam in Italy."

Social media platforms have emerged as central arenas for the production and circulation of political and cultural discourses, playing a crucial role in the shaping of public opinion. These platforms function as discursive spaces in which populist discourses increasingly thrive—narratives that draw on polarization, emotional appeals, and the construction of antagonistic identities, often directed at marginalized groups such as Muslim migrants. A recurring feature of such populist discourse is the representation of Islam as a cultural “other”: monolithic, alien, rigid, patriarchal, and ultimately perceived as a threat to the imagined cultural cohesion of European societies. At the core of this symbolic construct lies the figure of the Muslim migrant woman, who becomes a projection of fears and stereotypical imaginaries. She is frequently portrayed as a victim of an oppressive patriarchy, with the Islamic veil serving as a powerful symbol of submission and lack of autonomy. Using a qualitative approach, this doctoral research project aims to investigate YouTube comments of videos from right and left-wing actors engaged in the Italian online public debate, talking about Islam. Especial attention is given to the instrumentalization of the Muslim woman migrant within these discourses. The research also seeks to collect and incorporate, through semi-structured interviews, the lived experiences and perspectives of second-generation Muslim migrant women regarding the populist discourses against Islam identified in the collected and analyzed comments to uncover resistance and challenge prevailing reductive and stereotypical digital representations.

Dina Hessellund Winther, "Moral identities: Religious oscillation of queer Muslims as intersectional subjectivities."