The Big Bad Islam: Researching how Young Muslims Cope with Islamophobia (YMCI)

Islamophobia can have an enormous impact on (perceived) Muslims such as discrimination, unfair treatment at the hand of the justice system, social exclusion and violent hate crimes. How they cope with Islamophobia affects their mental and physical wellbeing. Yet, the central focus in academic research, as well as in societal debates, is often the problematization of Islamic culture rather than its underlying reasons and how young Muslims experience this. The societal debate on Muslims is often conducted without their participation and their voice is seldom heard in academic research. The present research proposal aims to fill this gap by researching Islamophobia from an emic approach, involving young Muslims in Belgium. Moreover, this research project will connect their experiences with the occurrence of Islamophobia, both in the Dutch- and French language news media in Belgium, which are rarely analyzed together. Through news media content analysis and in-depth interviews with both Young Muslims and media workers, this input will be framed within the larger context of Islamophobia research with three main objectives in mind: (1) contributing to the academic knowledge on this phenomenon; (2) formulating evidence-based solutions and (3) creating a platform to communicate our research findings to an academic and a general audience. This proposal brings together researchers from the social sciences (media sociology and journalism studies) in the two main linguistic communities.