ICSRU workshop
Miriam Jawadi talks about constructing Islam on Social Media and Mark Sedgwick talks about New Religious Movements in Islam.
Oplysninger om arrangementet
Tidspunkt
Sted
1451-516
Arrangør
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.
Mark Sedgwick, "New Religious Movements in Islam."
New Religious Movements (NRMs) have emerged periodically from the formative period of Islam to the present day. Mark Sedgwick is preparing a Cambridge Element on this phenomenon in which he considers a representative sample, organized by chronological period and then by type. In earlier periods, particular features of Islam either encouraged or discouraged the emergence of NRMs. Modernity brought new conditions that led to new types of NRM, the focus of the Element. Initially, NRMs like Wahhabism and the Aligarh Movement arose in resistance to modernity or in support of it. Then came NRMs adjusted to the age of mass modernity, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Gülen Movement in Turkey. The Element also examines Western NRMs of Islamic origin or coloring, notably the Nation of Islam in America and various Universalist Sufi movements. All these NRMs are understood in terms of their relationship with the dominant religious community, the host society, and political authority, as well as the novelty of their beliefs and practice.