We are very pleased to announce that in our next CASS project we will be working with The Aziz Foundation  to examine representations of Islam in the British press. The project will be led by Tony McEnery (Principal Investigator) with Gavin Brookes as Co-Investigator. We are also delighted to announce that Isobelle Clarke will be joining us later this year as Research Fellow on this project – welcome Isobelle! (introductory blog post to follow…).

The aim of this research will be to expand on previous work on this topic carried out by members of the Centre. The project will be methodologically innovative, devising new techniques and adapting existing methods to afford new insights into representations of Islam in the UK and how these vary across different parts of the Country and over time. Specifically, this project will be structured according the following three strands:

1. Examining press representations of Islam over time. This will involve expanding the University’s existing database of press articles about Islam – which currently represents national news articles up to 2015 – allowing for a comparison of representations of Islam over time, from 1998 to the present day.
2. Comparing national and regional press representations of Islam. As well as providing insight into what is, in the regional press, an under-researched area of media representations of Islam, this strand will also be able to address hypotheses which suggest that Muslims positively appraise local over national media coverage of Islam and Muslims (Open Society Institute, 2010: 215). In addition to expanding the existing dataset to include articles published up to the present day, as per (1), this strand will entail the expansion of this dataset to include regional (as well as national) newspaper articles about Islam published from 1998 to the present day. By studying temporal changes in both the national and regional press, this project will be able to assess the extent to which any shifts are uniform across both tiers (local/national) or, on the other hand, whether divergences between the two actually become starker over time.
3. Exploring the social effect of press representations. This strand will analyse how readers respond to both positive and negative framings of Islam in ‘below-the-line’ comments which accompanying the articles in the data. This strand will therefore take a wider view of societal discussions of Islam, comparing readers’ perspectives against press representations in order to ascertain the extent to which such representations might influence but also be challenged by the public. By exploring comments both on articles which contain positive as well as negative representations – as these are identified in (1) and (2) – this strand will provide useful evidence for demonstrating to the media the social effects of constructive journalism over poor journalistic practice.

We will actively engage members of the British Muslim community in our research by sharing our findings with them, listening to their thoughts and feedback, and helping them to read media texts more critically in order to challenge negative representations in the future, for example by formulating complaints that are informed by (corpus) linguistic insight. We are excited to begin this exciting project and are looking forward to working with The Aziz Foundation and, of course, to welcoming Isobelle to Lancaster!