Debates abound about low levels of engagement in mainstream civic life on the part of young Muslims from immigrant backgrounds living in non-Muslim majority countries. This paper investigates the emergent types of civic practice enacted by first or second generation Australian youth of major Muslim migrant communities, and suggests that in order to better understand the commonly identified problem of low levels of civic participation amongst this group it is necessary to situate the debate in broader conceptual frameworks regarding the shift towards 'do-it-yourself' citizenship on the part of the current generation. The paper argues for a focus on practices of youth cultural production and consumption, civic networks in everyday spaces, and work on the self as new forms of civic engagement, drawing on qualitative research with 80 young Muslims, who are outside both radical and mainstream formal associational practice.
The dramatic success of Gender Studies has rested on three developments:(1) making women's lives visible, which has also come to mean making all genders more visible; (2) insisting on intersectionality and so complicating the category of gender; (3) analyzing the tensions among global and local iterations of gender. Through textual analyses and humanities-based studies of cultural representations, as well as cultural studies of attitudes and behaviors, we have come to see the centrality of gender in the structure of modern life. This series embraces these advances in scholarship, and applies them to men's lives: gendering men's lives, exploring the rich diversity of men's lives -globally and locally, textually and practically -as well as the differences among men by class, race, sexuality, and age.
Debates about Shari’a law and legal pluralism have come to the fore of political discourse in many western multicultural societies including Australia. The mass media, in particular newspapers, have been active in reporting on Shari’a related news items and in doing so, have made a significant contribution to shaping political debate across western nations from governmental to grassroots levels. Understanding how newspapers report on Shari’a will provide important insights into how political discourse about Islam, western Muslims and Shari’a is formed. Utilizing the example of newspapers in Sydney, Australia, this article draws upon methodologies used to analyse the negative portrayals of new religious movements in the press. The article aims to analyse the way that Shari’a has been reported in key newspapers in Sydney over the last five years. It explores a variety of issues influencing the reporting of Shari’a including reporting of Shari’a at the local and international levels, the division between ‘good’ Shari’a (Islamic finance) and ‘bad’ Shari’a (family and criminal law) and differences between newspapers and media owners.
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