Tag Archives: muslim

25th Anniversary Conference for the Muslim News

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muslimnews0I was honoured to attend the 25th Anniversary Conference for the Muslim News on the 15th September. The event was organized by the Society of Editors and the Daily Telegraph had provided the venue – the spectacular Merchant Taylor’s Hall in the City of London. The event began with a speech by the Bob Satchwell, Executive Director of the Society of Editors and a welcoming speech by Lord Black of the Telegraph Media Group. Following that, Fatima Manji of Channel 4 News introduced me and I gave the morning’s keynote speech discussing the work which I did with Paul Baker and Costas Gabrielatos (Discourse Analysis and Media Attitudes, The Representation of Islam in the British Press) looking at the representation of Islam and Muslims in the UK press. I was also very happy to be able to present some early findings from a follow up study Paul Baker and I are currently doing, supported by CASS and the Muslim NGO MEND, looking at how things have developed since our work was published. This is based on approximately 80 million words more data composed of all UK national newspapers articles mentioning Muslims and Islam in the period 2010-2015.

The audience included a mixture of journalists, newspaper editors and TV news reporters and editors. In addition there were representatives from many faith groups and NGOs present too. The research was very well received by the audience. After the talk a panel was convened to discuss the work and take questions from the audience. The panel included John Wellington, the managing editor of the Mail on Sunday, Doug Wills, managing editor of the London Evening Standard and the Independent group of newspapers and Sue Ryan, former managing editor of the Daily Telegraph and manager of the trainee programme for the Mail group. It was a real privilege to be able to discuss our work with them and I found them to be open to criticism and ready to consider change. One point that emerged from the discussion that was of interest, I thought, was that the press are often criticized for their use of language when that usage is current in general English. While this puts the press in the spotlight, it also means that at times they can be in the vanguard of discussion and change in language use, as the recent discussion of the use of the word ‘migrant’ in the UK media has shown. This makes an engagement with media language all the more important for academic researchers.

Following this panel was a second panel, chaired by Fatima Manji, composed of the editors of ITN news and BBC news (Robin Elias and James Stephenson) as well as Channel 4’s Home Affairs correspondent Simon Israel. Julian Petley, author of Pointing the finger: Islam and Muslims in the British media, gave academic weight to this panel’s discussion. A very thought provoking discussion ensued about how to achieve a more inclusive and representative newsroom which demonstrated, once again, that the media was willing to engage in discussion and was prepared to embrace change.

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After lunch the final session, chaired by Ehsan Masood of Research Fortnight, followed a
contribution from Jonathan Heywood of Impress on a Leveson compliant media watchdog that Impress are developing. A lively debate followed led by the head of IPSO, Sir Alan Moses. Sir Alan was joined by prominent editors from The Sunday Times (Eleanor Mills) and The Observer (Stephen Pritchard) as well as the Managing Editor of the London Evening Standard and Independent Group, Will Gore. A key tension that was highlighted by Sir Alan Moses in the debate was between what in principle may be desirable and what is achievable in reality. He also made the important point that we have to decide as a society where we want regulation to end and a softer form of social regulation to begin. I finished the afternoon with a brief and rewarding discussion of my work with Sir Alan.

The event was a rare and precious opportunity to showcase academic research to a range of key stakeholders and for that opportunity I am very grateful both to MEND and to Muslim News.

New CASS Briefing: Representations of Islam in the British press, 1998 – 2009

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CASSbriefings-islamRepresentations of Islam in the British press, 1998 – 2009. Is the British press Islamophobic? How are Islam and Muslims typically written about? Have representations of Islam and Muslims changed over time, particularly since 9/11? Are some newspapers less ‘friendly’ towards Muslims than others? Read this CASS: Briefing of a large-scale corpus-based discourse analytical study to discover more.

New resources will be added regularly to the new CASS: Briefings tab above, so check back soon.

Profile: Junior Challenge Panel Member Julian Hargreaves

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Today, we are very pleased to introduce the second Junior Challenge Panel Member of 2013. Julian Hargreaves joins Mark McGlashan to round off this year’s group of junior researchers joining the Challenge Panel. Julian comes to CASS from Criminology, enhancing the cross-disciplinary perspective of the Panel. Here’s what he has to say by way of introduction:

Julian Hargreaves photo 2013I am a second year PhD student, and a Faculty Scholarship recipient, from the Lancaster University Law School. I study criminology, am interested in British Muslim communities, and am working on a thesis which looks at the concept of Islamophobia. More specifically, I am researching constructions of Islamophobia within British criminological literature and assessing whether the various assertions and conclusions found there are supported or challenged by available statistical evidence.

As part of my ongoing PhD commitments, I also teach two modules on the BA (Hons) Criminology degree: ASSC102 Crime and Social Life (a first year introduction to the study of criminology), and ASSC204 Measuring Crime (an introduction to the use of statistics within criminology for second year students). I have also provided lectures on the use of crime statistics, and the policing of ethnic minority communities.

I am interested in both quantitative and qualitative research methods. My research incorporates statistical analysis (particularly of large-scale social survey data) as well as qualitative research tools such as interviews, ethnographic study and the use of grounded theory. I am interested in the broader topics of civil liberties, social justice, hate crime, and the workings of the legal and criminal justice systems in the UK.

When I’m not busy at my desk I enjoy music (anything from classical to dancehall reggae), cinema (particularly film noir), cooking (especially Italian food), and attempting to counter the effects of the latter by occassionally visiting the sports centre.

John Sinclair lecture: “Primed for Violence? A corpus analysis of jihadist discourse”

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It was a great honour to give this year’s Sinclair Lecture at Birmingham University. I have long been an admirer of John’s work – there are many ideas he developed that are well worth critically engaging with. So to be asked to give a talk in his memory and honour was a challenge I happily took on. The topic of the talk I chose carefully – John liked ground breaking work and was a producer of daring and new ideas. So I thought an off-the-shelf piece of work was not right for this talk – it was more in keeping with the event to give a talk on a piece of work in progress. Having made that decision I then knew I should talk on the work I am developing on language and violence.

Language and violence is, in my view, a terribly under-researched topic. It is also an area which, sadly, has on-going relevance to human society. More positively, it is a topic on which linguists can – and to some extent do – provide insights. This talk was given in that spirit. I aim to show, as one would rightly expect of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science, the insights that a corpus approach may provide to an issue which reaches across the social sciences and beyond. In doing so I had to work with some quite challenging data. I think, however, that the results are at least indicative both of how this area of research may be opened up and how  linguists may contribute to its exploration. I think John would have liked this bold new venture and so I feel very comfortable in dedicating this talk to his memory.

Abstract:

‘How are people persuaded to be violent? How might a small group of people influence members of a larger group of people to behave in ways that they may normally find abhorrent? This talk looks at these questions, which are typically summarised as ‘radicalization’, using the example of jihadist language.I will explore how language may be manipulated in order to legitimate violent acts against certain groups or individuals in jihadist materials. However, I will also be exploring the important claim that there is a direct link between what the jihadists write and what other Muslims write, an assumption held by policy makers, academics and the media.

This talk examines how we look for linguistic evidence of this process, with an emphasis upon incitement to violence. If there is evidence that the manipulation of language in jihadist writing leads to a corresponding adaptation in either the Muslim mainstream media or the writing of ordinary Muslims over time, then we may begin to accept and understand with some linguistic sophistication what is at the moment assumed by many. We may also, however, be able to see how such radicalization is resisted, and hence better understand the process of resistance to radicalization also.

Central to my account of incitement to violence are the linked ideas of collocation and lexical priming. Together these begin to explain, I will argue, both the rhetorical process around incitement to violence and the broader dynamics in discourse that alienate and leave open to persuasion sections of society that may be persuaded to undertake violent acts.

My exploration is based on tens of thousands of words of corpus material, including i.) transcripts of so-called ‘martydom’ videos; ii.) texts by those who exhort jihadists to acts of violence; iii.) muslim news media and iv.) comment data from the Muslim news media. By drawing upon a range of sources like this, I will be better able to characterise the competing forces being brought to bear as different groups try to influence mainstream Muslim discourse.’