Political and Cultural Representations of Muslims ─ Islam in the Plural

Social scientists in Europe, Turkey, and Australia explore perception and public representations of Islam and Muslims at a time when international and national contexts make those identifications inescapably political. They are not concerned directly with government policy, but with public opinion and debate, grass-roots politics, ideological beliefs, the media, and public culture. Among the topics are uncovering an Islamic paradigm of international relations, diasporic resistance to the metaphoric darkening of female Muslim identity, Islamophobia and Turcoscepticism in four European countries, gender and figures of otherness in public discourse in Switzerland, and foreign policy and its impact on Arab stereotypes in English-language popular fiction of the 1970s-80s. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Christopher Flood, D.Phil. (1981) University of Oxford, is Emeritus Professor in the School of Politics, University of Surrey. His books and articles have centred on ideological discourses, political myth, and defensive nationalism. His most recent book (co-authored with Stephen Hutchings, Galina Miazhevich and Henri Nickels) is Islam, Security and Television News (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).Stephen Hutchings, Ph.D. (1987) University of Durham, is Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Manchester and President of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies. He has published widely on the Russian media and recently completed a major grant project on European television representations of Islam.Galina Miazhevich, Ph.D. (2007) University of Manchester, is Gorbachev Media Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford. She is also an associate of the Reuters Institute for Journalism, University of Oxford, and was previously a Research Associate at the University of Manchester. She has published extensively on media and socio-cultural change in post-communist societies. Henri C. Nickels, Ph.D. (2005), University of Amsterdam, is Programme Manager - Social Research at the EU Fundamental Rights Agency. He has published articles on the social construction of Muslim and Irish communities, recently including “De/constructing ‘Suspect’ Communities,” Journalism Studies (2012).