We interviewed 61 Muslims in 15 focus groups from the most visible Muslim population in the United States: the Detroit Metropolitan Area. Participants shared their experiences of and responses to Islamophobia on social media and face-to-face during the 2016 US presidential election campaign and aftermath. Applying Fraser’s and Squires’ theories of counterpublics, we developed an adapted understanding of counterpublics in collapsed contexts of online and face-to-face spaces. We argue that everyday Muslim internet users in the United States are an example of a hyper differential counterpublic. They face the pressures of near ubiquitous and ever evolving Islamophobic attacks, while needing to engage with the internet for personal and professional purposes. We suggest that hyper differential counterpublics operate in collapsed contexts of mixed, unimaginable publics, switch between group and individual responses, and craft hyper situational responses to discriminations case by case.
Islamophobia reached new heights during the 2016 United States presidential election. We applied the theory of intersectionality to 15 in-depth focus group interviews conducted in gender-separated groups with 61 Muslim participants (41 women, 20 men) in South East Michigan between October 2016 and April 2017 to understand the role of gender in their responses regarding Islamophobia during the 2016 United States presidential election and Trump's first hundred days in office as president. Both, Muslim women and Muslim men, labored to educate others about Islam online, but Muslim women emphasized their efforts to act as exemplars online of what it means to be Muslim in America more frequently and more strongly than men. Muslim women and men often used ignoring and contextualization as coping mechanisms as the number of Islamophobic messages online was perceived as overwhelming. The high amount and ubiquity of Islamophobic messages online has lead to a sense of futility and high levels of stress among young Muslims in South East Michigan, particularly for Muslim women.
Though the contemporary media environment is filled with many different sources disseminating communications about science-including journalists, politicians and opinion leaders, and researchers-few studies have examined how messages about science communicated by different sources directly influence audience opinion about scientific research itself. This experiment (N = 170) used stimuli articles that reflected different presentation sources (3: political/public relations/researcher) and types of science research (2: "hard"/"soft") to examine effects on people's attitudes toward the featured research project's (a) utility and (b) worthiness of federal grant funding, while controlling for individual differences in political attitudes and interest in science. Overall, political-source messages suppressed ratings of the project's worthiness of funding and utility, and while messages from the researcher source produced greater utility ratings compared to the public relations source for soft science projects, this pattern was reversed for hard science research. Additionally, different sources influenced people's comprehension of articles they read. We interpret these results within the larger landscape of science communication and conclude with brief practical recommendations for those engaging in science communication.
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