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Islamophobia, a form of discrimination targeting Muslims and individuals perceived to be Muslim, has been found to adversely affect health by disrupting various personal, social, and institutional systems within an individual and their environment (Samari, 2016). With reports of anti-muslim sentiments rising globally (Samari, 2016), Islamophobia deserves attention as a source of negative health outcomes and health disparities, yet little is known regarding the implications of Islamophobia for occupational therapy assessments and practice. This study aims to explore how Islamophobia impacts the participation of Muslim Americans in education, work, social activities, and other areas of occupation. A survey was conducted with 108 Muslim Americans, who shared their experiences and perceived effects of Islamophobia on their daily lives. Survey results indicated a significant correlation between experiences of Islamophobia and mental and emotional well-being, social connections, and self-expression and identity. Data collected also provided information regarding Islamophobia in different occupational settings. The study's findings shed light on research gaps within occupational therapy, particularly regarding the role of occupational therapists in addressing the impact of Islamophobia and racial and religious discrimination. This study proposes next steps to enhance the profession's understanding and capacity to effectively address the consequences of Islamophobia through various facets of occupational therapy, including assessment, intervention, education, and advocacy. / Temple University. College of Public Health / Health and Rehabilitation Sciences

In the Swedish political debate there is a general agreement about the problems with the integration process regarding especially third country nationals from Africa and Asia. In various SOU reports,1 there are testimonies about flaws in the interaction between the majority community and minority groups (where newly arrived third-country nationals are an especially prevalent group). Thus, Sweden has for several decades been in transformation from a culturally relatively homogeneous nation into a multicultural society. There have of course been cultures like the Sami, Finnish, Roma and German present alongside the Swedish majority culture. However, today there are neighborhoods where people with a “traditional” Swedish cultural background are a minority. Furthermore in almost all parts of society, like school, health, media etc., there are indications of discrimination (SOU 2006:73). This seems to be in line with a general tendency within the European Union where increased multiculturality has been fueling anti-immigrant movements of which some has even gained enough popular support to gain seats in the EU-parliament.

Sweden is today a country with ethnic, cultural and religious diversity. My aim in this study is to study what view of Islam and Muslims that students at a Catholic school in Stockholm have. The reason why Catholic schools are interesting to study is that previous research has showed that Muslim students around Europe often attend catholic schools as they are regarded as more tolerant towards religion. This study is based on a questionnaire and personal interviews with upper secondary students at the Catholic school in Stockholm. The result is compared with previous research on students of the same age group (12-15 years). The results of the survey show that the majority of students have a positive attitude towards Islam and Muslims, but that there is a small group at the Catholic School who have negative attitude towards Islam and Muslims. The negative attitude increases when it comes to the Muslim’s rights, for example the right to build mosques in Sweden. The results also show that students with parents with higher education are more tolerant than students with parents with no academic education. I have used Mattias Gardell’s definition of Islamophobia to analyze the result from the survey and interview among the students at the Catholic school. When using this definition, we can see that the students have some islamophobic thoughts about Muslims and Islam. The results indicate that the school needs to actively work with this question in a more constructive way. One of my suggestions are that they need to talk more about Islam and Muslims during the lessons so the students gain knowledge about the religion but also create situations where non-Muslims and Muslims meet. In this way, students can integrate with each other. This study only shows the attitudes among the students at this Catholic School.

This essay is a study of  textbooks in religious education for middle school. Textbooks are for many, the first contact with religion and they contain a shorter description of different religions. The study is supported by theories of 'Islamofobi' by Mattias Gardell as well as oriental studies by Edward W. Said. The purpose of the study is to examine how textbooks describe islam and muslims' situation in Sweden. Four textbooks from 1992 until 2011 have been used in the examination. The purpose is also to investigate the differences and/or similarities between these texts. The survey was made by a qualitative content analysis. The result shows that confusing facts emerges regarding islam and muslims' situation in Sweden, as well as muslims' tend to be described as a homogeneous group. In more modern textbooks you will find that muslims' are described as a homogenous group less than before, but there are still parts of the texts which are very generalising.

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

With increased Islamophobia across Europe, White Danish citizens' mistrust of Danish Muslim minorities has partially been focused on private schools with large Muslim populations. Politicians who argue for the increased regulation of private schools rely on the narrative that these schools foster a parallel society by preventing students from becoming fully integrated into society as a 'democratic citizen.' In this dissertation, I respond to these critiques by drawing on a year of fieldwork at a private high school founded by Turkish parents in Copenhagen, Denmark. Narratives from the school's students and parents illuminate not only why some parents choose private schools for their children but also how schooling influences the students' subject positions and their ability to navigate public space. Specifically, I argue that rather than produce a parallel society, private schools operate as what Gillian Rose (1993) calls a 'paradoxical space,' wherein subjects can position themselves as both the center and the margin. By allowing students the space to form their identity as a majority, they are empowered to grow up and engage society differently than those who have grown up with constant reminders of their minority status. In making this argument, I show how geographers can contribute to the growing use of intersectionality within the social sciences. I also point to the importance of space when unpacking how multiple axes of social division are in play, including how space produces different forms of inequality, and what this says about social structures of power in Denmark.

Popular support for the British National Party (BNP) in England reached unprecedented high levels during the early twentieth century. The BNP won a number of local council and European Parliament seats on the back of this popularity. This study seeks to provide a case study of one such poll success: Nuneaton 2008. Evidence from Nuneaton, a BNP success not previously studied, will be used to test the literature already generated addressing other locations of ‘breakthrough’, including Burnley and Stoke (Burnett 2011; Rhodes 2009). The thesis seeks to explain why the BNP was able to win elections where there had previously been no appetite for far right politics. The research focuses on the role of demand and supply-side factors contributing to the electoral success of the BNP in 2008, showing that any analysis of the far right has to be multivariate in nature. The demand-side variables identified and analysed are: socioeconomics, immigration and Islamophobia. The supply-side factors assessed are political opportunity structures, the BNP campaign strategy and the role of the media. A mixed-method approach was undertaken which included interviews with voters and politicians, focus groups, a questionnaire capturing the views 308 constituents, and archival research of socioeconomic data and newspaper reports. The findings of this research indicate that the BNP’s electoral breakthrough in Nuneaton was multivariable in nature, and it is reasonable to argue that particular variables were more significant than others. Immigration stands out as the most prominent variable. In addition, the role of the media, the press in particular, was of great significance in explaining breakthrough in Nuneaton through the sanitising and legitimising of negative stereotypes of immigrants, asylum seekers and Muslims. This case study also suggests that Islamophobia should be regarded as a key factor. Indeed, Islamophobia was an important part of the jigsaw and conflates with a number of variables tested in this thesis. In sum, this research broadly corroborates the existing literature. It does however suggest that socioeconomics has been overplayed to a degree in previous studies, while Islamophobia has been underplayed.

Thesis advisor: Eve E. Spangler / Thesis advisor: C. Shawn C. McGuffey / My dissertation, “Race, Religion, and Class at the Intersection of High-Skilled Immigration,” takes a comprehensive approach to understanding the contemporary contexts of U.S. immigration underlined by Islamophobia and neo-liberal conditions of the U.S. economy. Methodologically, the data for my dissertation comes from the lived experiences of first-generation South-Asian Muslim immigrants arriving as young adults in search of their American dream, pursuing their graduate education in the fields of liberal arts, and science and technology, finding job prospects as high-skilled labor, growing into families, and emerging as American citizens. I study their acculturation and integration experiences, using two distinct groups of high-skilled migrants, i.e., short-term (international students) and long-term (permanent-residents), for which I conducted a total of 68 life-history interviews across the two categories. These ethno-racial and religiously othered identities located at the confluence of their Asian American and South Asian identities, model minority stereotypes, and racialized Muslim constructs present a unique window in examining the social and cultural processes of high-skilled immigration underlined by the political contexts of the War on Terror (WOT) era, and the recent Muslim ban. I study these intersectional identities using the case of Pakistani migrants, who continue to be the largest Muslim immigrant group by national origins in the U.S. Moreover, they also have higher skill levels than the native population (MPI 2015), making the non-white, Pakistani Muslim immigrant experience in the U.S. ideal for the study of high-skilled immigration.The first chapter, titled “Double Consciousness: How Pakistani Graduate Students Navigate Their Contested Identities in American Universities,” contributes to the knowledge of contemporary contexts of Islamophobia. It presents a global and transnational frame to DuBoisian theories of double consciousness, illustrating how Pakistani graduate students perceive their religious and national identities as threatening within the Western political constructs of Islamic terrorism. They experience a sense of twoness as they pursue their academic lives in the United States. While they see their religion as an extension of their cultural selves, they battle with the social constructions of terrorism imposed on their Muslim and Pakistani identities by the American political rhetoric on WOT. Thus, continuously challenging the stereotypes surrounding their contested identities as global Muslim migrants. The research has been published alongside educational policy practitioners and academics in a Springer publication titled International Students from Asia: The Two-Way Street of Learning and Living Globalization. The second chapter, titled “Gendered acculturation: Pakistani international graduate students navigating U.S. culture,” is a publication in the Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and presents new ways of thinking about the acculturation of non-white migrants as a gendered process. I demonstrate that the interplay of their intersectional identities underlines their acculturative strategies. Moreover, their gender identity emerges as a master status, shaping how they interact with different aspects of American culture distinct from their home cultural settings. The third article, titled “From 9/11 to Travel Bans: The Contemporary Ethno-Racial, High-Skilled Muslim American experience,” focused on the experiences of long-term immigrants, examines how South Asian Muslim Americans come to terms with the outburst of Islamophobia surrounding their ethno-racial and religious identities. The study theoretically contributes to understanding the intersectional relationships of upwardly mobile classed, gendered, and racialized immigrant identities that conflate the issues of race and religion. Bringing together racialization theory, intersectionality theory, and the concept of master status, I demonstrate how high-skilled Muslim immigrants present their understandings of the Islamophobic contexts of the American mainstream. I show that while their religious identity serves as a master status to their racialized experiences, the intersectional dimensions of their complex identities are crucial to how they experience overt and covert forms of Islamophobia in their personal and professional lives. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

A diaspora’s flag is the symbolic representation of that community. The Iranian flag, however, is a contested symbol among the Iranian diasporic community. As this research shows, the Iranian diaspora exhibits its cultural, political, and religious identities through three different Iranian flags. Through qualitative research, entailing months of participant observation and a series of semi-structured interviews, I investigate the underlying reasons for this flag disagreement. Through this research, I argue that an Iranian diaspora’s pre-migration communal history and post-migration environmental factors influence its establishment and maintenance in the host nation. In this study, I revisit the diaspora literature to argue for the complexity of the concept of diaspora. I demonstrate how a diaspora assists the community in restructuring its lost cultural identity and establishing a social space to belong, in the time of the spatial and cultural dislocation. The Iranian diaspora’s flag selection is a symbolic representation of communal establishment and identity formation for the community. The Iranian flag debate indicates a communal divide; it is also an instrument to set social boundaries to develop a community under the symbolic representation of the ancestral homeland. Furthermore, this research explores how the Iranian diaspora uses the Iranian flag as a proxy to indicate socio-communal expectations and intersectional social hierarchies that already exist among the Iranian community. When discussing the flag’s symbolic significance, the respondents relate the flag with three recurring themes of religion, gender, and sexuality. The association of the Iranian flag with these three social factors indicates the communal dynamics of the Iranian diaspora. These communal dynamics establish certain norms and values, but they also redefine each flag based on its socio-political history. The attached meaning to each flag consequently causes tension and disagreement among the Iranian community, which is not solely political. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The Iranian diaspora is a young and growing community that came into existence after the Islamic revolution of 1979. In this diaspora, there are three different flags on display, and each flag represents a socio-political ideology. The symbolic application of the flag facilitates this research in exploring the social interaction among the Iranian diaspora residing in the Greater Toronto Area and York Region. Through the examination of the flag debates, I investigate the significance of community building in the new host nation. I critically analyze the communal divide existing among the Iranian community and the flag debate that is a symbolic representation of Iranian group dynamics. The discussion of the flag for many starts a conversation about community development and socio-communal hierarchy. While the different versions of the Iranian flags bring the diasporic communities together, they also indicate social segregation caused by religious, gender, and sexual hierarchies existing among the Iranian diaspora.