British Muslims and Their Discourses

Section I.Engagement In Social Dynamics.- Chapter 1. Muslim Political Agency In British Politics.- Chapter 2. Believing And Belonging: Media Representations Of Islam And Muslims In Britain And Its Relationship To British Civil Religion.- Chapter 3. Politics, Public Relations And Islam In The UK Public Sphere.- Chapter 4. Social Representations And The Threat To Worldview: A Socio-Psychological Perspective On Islamophobia.- Chapter 5. Creating Shia Spaces In British Society: The Role Of Transnational Twelver Shia Networks In North-West London.- Section II. Expressions Of Personal Identity.- Chapter 6. British Muslims, Music And Religious Authority: The Contested Ground Of Discourse And Praxis.- Chapter 7. Civilising Attempts In Art And Islam: Muslim Artistic Performance Facing Social Orders In The UK.- Chapter 8. Challenging Terrorist Ideologies Through Education.- Chapter 9. The Agency Of Muslim Women As Mothers And Mothered.- Chapter10. Online Dating For British Muslims, And The Relationship With Their Islamic Identities.

Laurens de Rooij gained his doctorate at Durham University in England. He is currently an Associate Lecturer in the Sociology of Islam, at the Al Mahdi Institute. His research examines how non-Muslim people in Britain interact with news reports about Islam and Muslims and how that affects their interpretation and conceptualization of Islam and Muslims, as well as any subsequent interactions. This is approached from an interdisciplinary perspective that discusses the issue of media reports about Muslims and Islam whilst drawing upon areas such as hermeneutics, media studies, philosophy of identity, post-colonial theory and religious studies. The research hopes to garner a greater understanding into the way the individual understands and interprets media reports related to Islam as well as the effect a media report can have on the way it is perceived and received.Laurens has spent time at a number of institutions across the globe, these Include: The Graduate School of the Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta, Indonesia (spring 2013), the Religion Department at Duke University in Durham North Carolina, USA (Autumn 2013), The Centre for Religion, Media and Culture in the Journalism & Mass Communication Department at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, USA (spring 2014), and at Brazil's Fundação Joaquim Nabuco (summer 2016). In 2017 he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Cape Town for a year, where his research analyses how the media discourse on minorities (particularly Muslims and Islam) affects how they are conceptualized, understood, and treated in South Africa. This work was supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa. He was also a lecturer at the University of Chester (2018), and a researcher at London Metropolitan University (2018-2020), Toulouse School of Management (2021-2022) in France, and Mahidol University in Bangkok, Thailand (2022-2023).