Search

This article traces the course of a series of moral panics over the banding together, group identification and collective action of certain groups of young people -- mainly young men -- in and around some mass sporting events in New South Wales, Australia, in 2001-4. It could be a story of 'football hooliganism', except that the sport is not football (or 'soccer', as it is known in Australia), but rugby league. That such 'collective behaviour' had been relatively unknown in this sporting milieu in Australia provided the opportunity for the racialized 'othering' of those labelled as deviant, in the context of the construction of the 'Arab Other' (and later the Muslim Other) as the pre-eminent folk demon of contemporary Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including Islamophobia and hate crime, the oppression of Muslim women in Great Britain, and honour based violence.

Presents information on a study which examined the mapping of ethnic identity among a group of Arabic-speaking youth in Southwestern Sydney. Dynamics of identity formation among adolescents in relation to interactions with friends, other language background youth and family; Strategic essentialism and hybridity among Arabic-speaking youth.

In Australia since about the turn of the millennium, discrimination against Muslims has been increasingly normalized, made respectable, and presented as prudent precaution against violent extremism. Vilification of Muslims has posed as defending 'Australian values' against those who will not integrate. Liberal political leaders and press leader-writers who formerly espoused cultural pluralism now routinely hold up as inimical the Muslim folk devil by whose otherness the boundaries of acceptability of the national culture may be marked out and policed. The Muslim Other is positioned not only as culturally incommensurate, but dangerously so: dishonest, criminally inclined, violent, misogynist, homophobic, backward, uncivilized. On the far right, extremist nationalist organizations incite racist hatred under cover of this rhetoric, often cloaked as reasonable common sense. This paper undertakes an ideology analysis of political and media discussion, and examines the forms of social control that they advance and sustain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores migration stories and examines the ways migrants use their gardens as sites of cultural practice in the Fairfield municipality of Western Sydney, one of the most ethnically diverse regions in Australia. We argue that many of those from diverse cultural backgrounds use their gardens in ways very different from the stereotypical conceptions of Australian suburbia. Far from being idyllic places of retreat and repose separate from the world of work, our research reveals that many migrant gardens are places in which creative labour is expended to symbolise connections not only to homeland but also to Australia and to other cultures. We concentrate in this paper on two general patterns of backyard activity. The first is intensively horticultural, involving creating a backyard smallholding for growing produce traditional to the homeland. Secondly those, mainly from urban or middle-class backgrounds, who transform their backyards into exhibition spaces, outlets for their creative impulses as artists and amateur curators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the advent of multiculturalism in Australia in the 1970s, 'ethnicity' has acquired not only cultural and social importance, but significant political consequences as groups mobilised around 'ethnic communities' and as the State increasingly structured social policy around cultural differences. The political patronage and funding central to Australian multiculturalism led to the development of organisations and leaders whose task was not only to service the needs of specific 'ethnic communities' but to represent them in the wider political field. This paper traces the emergence in Australia of the field of ethnic politics, in the Bourdieusian sense. Using the Lebanese 'ethnic community' as a case study, we analyse the accumulation by 'community leaders' of 'ethnic capital', which converts to symbolic capital that is recognised by the State as the capacity of leaders to represent ethnic communities. We argue that conflicts arising over moral panics around 'Lebanese youth gangs' in Sydney since 1998 have undermined the legitimacy of Lebanese community leadership. This has coincided with moves by the NSW government to devalorise 'ethnicity' and substitute it with 'communal relations', which accord with the national shift away from multiculturalism under the Howard government, as the politics of 'One Nation' are increasingly mainstreamed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]