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Following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, end-of-life rituals and funerals across groups of all faiths and none took on a new character due to government-imposed measures to control disease transmission. This article aims to explore the challenges faced by British-Bangladeshi Muslims in relation to performing end-of-life, funeral, and mourning rituals during the first pandemic wave, underpinned by the perception of a 'good death'. This group was among those disproportionately affected by Covid-19-related mortality and morbidity. Contextualising the study within a review of the literature on deathscapes and shifting policy responses to multicultural populations in the UK, and using an in-depth qualitative research approach, the article highlights the ways in which pre-existing challenges facing individuals seeking Islamic end-of-life, funeral and bereavement rituals have been exacerbated by Covid-19. The article offers new empirical and conceptual insights into the spatio-temporal dimension of end-of-life and funerary practices performed by British-Bangladeshi Muslims to achieve a good death and the changing nature of embodied and virtual deathscapes triggered by the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a framework for understanding how 'halal' food consumption is understood, practiced and experienced by British Muslims through an empirical study in Birmingham (UK). There are emerging bodies of literature in geography that analyse food/animal ethics and work recognising the increasing importance of the halal food industry. However, there is also a need to understand how ethical and theological concerns translate when scaled down to individual food choices and experiences of Muslims, as they negotiate food consumption as a minority group. Accordingly, this paper utilises qualitative data from an in-depth study to develop a framework for understanding halal food consumption from the perspective of British Muslims. Utilising conceptual literature on food/animal ethics, abjection and belonging it draws evidence into three corresponding sections: (i) Blood – the ethics of religious slaughter processes; (ii) Body – the embodied responses to 'clean' and 'impure' food, and (iii) Belonging – integral connections between halal food and notions of belonging. The paper concludes by suggesting that this framework is a helpful starting point from which to understand the ways in which halal food consumption scales down from abstraction to practice, from ethics to embodied experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to understand how Chinese Muslims negotiate their identities and how they are included and excluded in urban Guangzhou – a multicultural and multi-ethnic city in south China – through the lens of food. This empirical research consists of intersectional and interactional analysis based on narratives of both the ethnic majority and minority groups. Drawing on a qualitative analysis, this research sheds light on both Muslim geographies of encounter and geographical studies on food consumption in China's multicultural context. Focusing on daily food practices of Chinese Hui Muslims who are immigrated to Guangzhou from Islamic communities in northwest China, this research elucidates how these Muslims use food to sustain their religious identities, how they manage their food practices when eating with Han Chinese and how such daily food practices integrate them into or exclude them from the mainstream Han Chinese culture in relation to wider socio-political issues. The key argument of this research indicates that public food spaces, on the one hand, can enable the social interactions between Chinese Muslims and non-Muslims, and on the other hand, gain new meanings through the encounters of these two groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Islamophobia often refers to systemic racism against Muslims and the lived experiences of discrimination against people who are perceived as Muslim. These forms of racism and discrimination have intensified in the last couple of decades, especially since the War on Terror. This introduction argues that Islamophobia is a spatialized process that occurs at different scales in Muslim-minority countries: globe, nation, urban, neighbourhood, body and emotion. First, we outline a genealogy of the term, Islamophobia. Second, we demonstrate the ways in which Islamophobia occurs at different scales and is connected between scales. Finally, we introduce the papers in the special issue to highlight our argument that Islamophobia is multi-scalar. We also show how the methodological contributions of the research within geographies of Islamophobia can impact policy-making and political organizing against Islamophobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on deathscapes has thus far neglected the diversity of mortuary practices resulting from the inherently spatial phenomenon of migration and the increased capacity for transnational activities linking migrant communities with places of origin. Against this sedentarist bias, this article proposes that the end of life is a critical juncture in the settlement process for diasporic communities. On the one hand, practices such as posthumous repatriation may serve to reinforce shared perceptions of temporary presence in host countries. On the other hand, death may be the occasion to lay what are perhaps the deepest foundations for home-making in diaspora, through funeral rituals and memorialisation. However, these latter claims to space in adopted homelands may also be the object of legal and political contestation, as demonstrated through an analysis of disputes in the UK over open-air Hindu funeral pyres and planning permission for a Muslim cemetery. What is at stake is the legitimate symbolic re-inscription of space. As such, diasporic deathscapes are an exemplary site of contestation and negotiation between migrant place-making practices and the domesticating urges of governmental subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographies are taking center stage in debates about new, contested forms of imperialism. Geographers have developed a powerful analysis of the spatial dynamics of imperialism, which remains somewhat rarefied, obscuring many of the ways in which people speak about imperialism in their daily lives. Taking seriously the postcolonial injunction to listen to colonized peoples and to those who stand with and for them, this article describes empirical research among activists who bring anti-imperialism to practical political projects and in so doing animate and renew this way of thinking and speaking. Interviews were conducted with members of three politicized communities, who mobilized distinct anti-imperial traditions in their opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These interviews-with Muslims, nationalist-separatists, and socialists in the United Kingdom-chart a series of interconnected, vernacular spaces of resistance. They show and suggest how, in the grounded and heterogeneous places of activist practice, and through imaginative and rhetorical geographies of resistance, the ideas and languages of imperialism are being mobilized and measured, sometimes found wanting, but ultimately animated and renewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]