From the geopolitical to the everyday : 'home' for Muslim women in London and Bristol.

Abstract

My thesis examines ideas of home, identity and belonging for Muslim women within the context of the domestic ‘War on Terror’. My project has two main strands. My research is framed by a discursive examination of both the mobilization of ideas of home and the positioning of Muslim women within imaginative geographies of the domestic War on Terror. I focus upon media coverage of terror plot home raids (beginning with the 7/7 bombings) and subsequent socio-political debates concerning the ‘veil’. The second strand of my research concentrates upon exploring the lived experience and emotional geographies of home, identity and belonging for Muslim women in London and Bristol. My research addresses several important research agendas. I contribute to and develop contemporary debates concerning geographies of race and racism. I examine both the construction of racialised discourses of national identity, belonging and securitization and how racism is experienced negotiated and resisted. I examine some of the effects that religio-racial profiling has had upon my participants’ everyday lives, geographies of mobility and articulations of belonging/citizenship, particularly in relation to national identity. I argue that covering practices as a marker of religious identity have socio-spatial effects, which inform my participants’ negotiation and inhabitation of the different localities encountered within their everyday geographies. I explore how identity and belonging are experienced through the material and emotional creation of home, particularly in relation to religious practices, arguing that home becomes an important site of identity affirmation in relation to experiences of racism. More broadly my research contributes to debates concerning the increasing prevalence of religion within contemporary community and individual identity politics. Finally, I draw out how my participants’ experiences impact upon their ideas of citizenship and belonging, augmenting theorisations of citizenship which posit citizenship as multiple and rooted in place not nationality.