Reclaiming the Narrative: Challenging Islamophobia and empowering young British Muslims

RTN uses Participatory Arts Based Research because it is useful in engaging marginalised young people as agentic, knowledgeable actors who are best placed to define, label and articulate their own realities. In doing so, RTN demotes the usually dominant narratives of blame and victimhood associated with young Muslims by both socio-political and academic discourses. In doing so, RTN consciously democratizes and disrupts the traditional knowledge hierarchies between participants and researchers and ensures the expert voice of young Muslim Britons is centralised from inception to dissemination.

Initial analysis of the data indicates the following emergent themes:

Reactive pride

While much academic literature focuses on exclusion, victimization and marginality, participants emphasize resistance and reaction to those processes. Qualitative exploration using the visual artifacts as prompts identified a symbiotic process; the discursive imposition of the excluded and immutably different Muslim ‘other’ identity versus the reactive forging of British Muslim self-identity as agentic, prideful and politically mobilised (see pic 1, Pride and Protest).

Human rights are partial and contingent:

Participants showed an acute awareness that apparently universal human rights were partially accessible in the social space they occupy. In particular, hijabi participants applied this to modest dressing and asserted gender equality has been colonized by monoculturalism to such an extent that embodied emancipation is ring-fenced to Eurocentric symbols and practices.

To find out more about the research, please contact Dr Fatima Khan: F.Khan@mmu.ac.uk