The ‘changing same’ of an ‘in-between’ generation: negotiating identities through space, place and time

Abstract

In this paper I present the ‘everydayness’ of a particular group of young Muslim women and their families as they dance between a range of contradictory and shifting discourses. Through an analysis situated between the social and the cultural, the paper argues that as an ‘in-between’ generation these young women are now part of communities who are re-constructing their identities in response to what is happening around them. Through their re-contextualisation of Islam as they de-contextualise it from their parent's cultural investments, they have become ‘more confident to be seen as Muslim’. However, they are often in a dialogue with their own children and parents, as to what constitutes being Muslim in Britain and in contention with those, who often through the mass media, seek to homogenise them as Muslims, and then label them. The analysis uses the notion of a ‘mythic feedback loop’ as a heuristic device to link thinking, feeling and action and ‘mythcourse’ as a way of tracing the trajectory of these loops and mapping these inter-generational shifts. The themes threading through the paper are ones of a ‘changing same’ and ‘in-betweenness’ which I use to explore the nexus of religion, culture, identities and education to re-engage with debates around multiculturalism, majority and minority identities, democratic renewal and active citizenship.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.