Dissenting Citizenship? Young People and Political ...

Parliamentary Affairs (2012) 65, 115–137

doi:10.1093/pa/gsr055

Dissenting Citizenship? Young People and Political Participation in the Media-security Nexus1 Ben O’Loughlin 1,* and Marie Gillespie 2 2

Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK; Open University, UK

*

Correspondence: [email protected]

During the last decade, a media-security nexus has emerged that has exacerbated pervasive feelings of the precariousness of citizenship among British Muslims. Legally, citizenship became reversible while political and media discourses and religious discrimination compounded by racism created deep unease about belonging, identity and the very possibility of multicultural citizenship. With diminishing prospects for effective participation in formal political processes, except through the domineering framework of counter-terrorism, young British Muslims sought alternative arenas and modes of political debate and engagement. They expressed their dissent from the suffocating politics of security in informal ways that were deemed efficacious in their own terms. While a sense of loss of status and respect, and deep disappointment at how fellow Muslims were being vilified, was present among older generations, young British Muslims responded in politically creative ways that can be described as ‘dissenting citizenship’. This article reflects on findings from an ESRC-funded collaborative ethnography, Shifting Securities, conducted across 12 cities in Britain between 2004 and 2007 that investigated how a very diverse, multi-ethnic group of some 239 British people experienced citizenship and security in a time of relentless news of terrorism, conflict and natural disaster catastrophes and ‘creeping securitisation’ in day-to-day life in Britain. Our research suggests that dissenting rather than disaffected citizenship is a growing trend particularly among multi-ethnic youth who aspire to work critically within and revitalise mainstream politics to safeguard their citizenship status via local and translocal personalised forms of political action rather than engage in conventional forms of national party politics.

This paper was presented at a panel on young people and political participation organised by James Sloam at the Political Studies Association Annual Conference in London on 20 April 2011. We would like to thank him for his support with this initiative.

# The Author [2012]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

Downloaded from http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on March 16, 2012

1

116

1.

Parliamentary Affairs

The problem and our study

In Bowling Alone, published a year before the attacks of 11 September 2001, Robert Putnam argued that increased civic engagement ‘would be eased by a palpable national crisis, like war or depression or natural disaster, but for better or worse, America at the dawn of the new century faces no such galvanising crisis’ (Putnam, 2000, p. 402). This article asks whether the effects rippling out from that event were ‘for worse’ for young people and their experiences of citizenship in the UK. The problem posed by Sloam in the introduction to this special issue is this:

What is special about the multi-ethnic generation living in cities marked by ‘superdiversity’, who came of age in the aftermath of 9/11 and around the time of the London Bombings, is the intensification of the media-security nexus. This refers to the mutually reinforcing set of relationships whereby media coverage of events triggers public reactions that lead to the demonisation of minorities who are represented as connected to threats. After 9/11, and the 7/7 London bombings in 2005, public debate in Britain was characterised by progressive hostility towards Muslims, disenchantment at the diminishing prospects of multicultural citizenship and a sense of disenfranchisement—perceived and actual. Disenfranchisement can take many forms—legal, political, social and cultural and young British Muslims especially, compared with their peers—experienced disenfranchisement in each of these intertwined domains. We aim to explore how young British Muslims understood themselves to be positioned as political subjects in the 2004 – 2007 period and how they responded politically to these circumstances. The media-security nexus is not new, so we also aim to illuminate how it operates in a transformed media ecology in which multilingual citizens can access an unprecedented range of national and international media. We advance two main arguments. First, young people faced dominant discursive frameworks that linked Muslims to terrorism. They faced conventional national party politics and government policies that, in their complicity with mainstream media, reproduced these ideologically loaded frames. For some, there appeared no possibility of escape, resulting in a sense of alienation. Others, however, invested hope in the improvement of normal politics through


While it is possible to argue that there is nothing special about the current generation of young people – and that recent trends toward non-participation in electoral politics can be explained by the ‘lifecycle effect’ – if we are to understand political participation at all, we must explore how each new generation comes to develop its own conceptions of democracy and comes to develop new repertoires of civic and political engagement. (Emphasis added)

Dissenting Citizenship?

117

2

For full details of the methodological approach, subjects of study, ethnographic analyses and findings of this larger study see Gillespie (2007a,b).


small, cumulative acts that modify ‘the mainstream’ and its discourses from within. The intensified demonisation of specific minority groups through the media-security nexus is nothing new, and minoritised groups know this through experience. The exacerbation of discriminatory processes operated in Britain after the 1991– 1992 Gulf War and following the attacks of 9/11 (Gillespie, 1995; Gillespie, 2007a,b). Hence, we argue secondly that an important register in young people’s political repertoire is ‘dissenting citizenship’. This refers to ways in which individuals express frustration and disappointment with political processes and decisions and media coverage of associated events, but seek to remedy discriminatory practices over time rather than work towards revolutionary change in political or media systems (Maira, 2009). When their sense of identity and citizenship were challenged, individuals whom we worked with showed restraint, and awareness that the cycles of intensified demonisation and discrimination in response to security events would abate with time. They sought and found ways to hold on to their sense of entitlement to British (if not multicultural) citizenship by undertaking small, strategic everyday acts, seeking to educate their peers or co-workers, outside engagement with formal political institutions. In other words, dissenting citizenship may be rebellious, critical, angry and disappointed but the youth in our study believe in and invest in citizenship as an entitlement. We draw on a study conducted across 12 cities in the UK.2 Multilingual ethnographers immersed in their own local areas followed how individual and community understandings of security were affected by living through a period of terrorist attacks, international conflicts and natural disasters. These events were sometimes experienced directly (like 7/7) but reached people most commonly via news media and entertainment. The majority of interviewees were known to the 13 interviewers working collaboratively on the project from previous qualitative social research projects and/or other social relations. In other cases, researchers deployed a variety of methods to elicit spontaneous, self-revealing speech and to observe everyday media practices. Across 30 months the ethnographers conducted interviews, focus groups and participant observation techniques with 239 people around the UK and Ireland, with interviews conducted in English but sometimes in two or three languages (see demographic table in Appendix). While approximately two-thirds of participants were categorised as Muslim, the study was events led rather than, say, a study of ‘Muslim disaffection’. Ethnicity, politics, legitimacy and citizenship were not treated as a priori concepts; rather, analysis identified how events, experiences and interactions led to the mobilisation of these categories.

118


3

The term ‘British Muslims’ is problematic and used here with caution. It masks the huge diversity within this category, and some British Muslims who understood themselves as labelled as such, and who even identified themselves as such during the research process, felt they were implicated in media discourses as potential terrorists and thus faced unwarranted associations with terrorism, implicit or explicit, on a daily basis.


We use the term ‘media-security nexus’ to describe this context, which involved ‘global uncertainties’ and local insecurities, for citizens and for policymakers, and which was labelled for a time a ‘war on terror’. Young British Muslims3 in particular experienced great disappointment at the failure of huge public demonstrations to prevent the 2003 Iraq War and the introduction of a range of domestic and transnational counter-terrorist policies that had a disproportionate impact on the everyday lives of British Muslims. These policies were passed by a democratically elected government; many of the participants of our study spoke of a legitimacy ‘deficit’ (Gillespie, 2006). How, then, did young British Muslims respond? Where did the diverse group of young people that we worked with seek and to what extent did they find effective (in their terms) arenas political debate and action? What repertoires of engagement did they adopt, develop and deploy to respond to and to escape the crippling confinement of counter-terrorism and hyper-securitisation especially in the period following the London Bombings? Finding answers to these questions requires qualitative research methods. Our paper responds to recent calls by leading political scientists to develop methodologies to yield findings about how people understand politics and the experience of ‘doing politics’ (Hay et al., 2008). For instance, after conducting a survey of young people to find out whether they engage with politics online, Ward and de Vreese (2011, pp. 410 –411) admit their survey ‘did not make available an in-depth portrait of what young people actually do online’. This paper presents an analysis of a collaborative, multi-sited ethnography and consequently is able to generate insights about people’s understanding and engagements with politics over time. Ethnography is less a method than an ethos—an approach based on fieldwork in a local milieu where the social and cultural distance between researcher and researched is minimised through participatory forms of research and active presence among and engagement with interlocutors. It usually depends on participant observation—interacting with people in a naturalistic setting (e.g. co-watching TV in situ) and extensive documentation of conversations and activities during which assumptions, perceptions and responses to experiences are revealed over time. Observation and engagement is often bolstered by interviews, document analysis and surveys which together build up a ‘thick’ description of the cultural phenomenon under study—in this case the media-security nexus.


119


Political scientists have used ethnography to study political institutions such as parties, international organisations and NGOs as well as social movements, terrorist networks and mafias (for a review, see Halperin and Heath, 2011). Prolonged ethnographic research in small US towns by Eliasoph (1998) and Maira (2009) has illuminated how diverse groups of citizens formulate their political views, discuss politics in private and public spaces, and the conditions and constraints that shape the likelihood of political action and the very notion of what constitutes political action (from talking politics to attending a demonstration to consumer boycotts). Collaborative ethnography in multi-ethnic milieux conducted over time has the potential to address longstanding questions concerning participation, socialisation and alienation that remain central to the study of politics. Political science has struggled to grasp how young people engage politically since they may talk about political issues in vocabulary that is not reflected on surveys or in conventional elite discourses. In the media-security nexus and the context of war on terror rhetoric, many of the Shifting Securities respondents spoke of their own and others’ reluctance to talk about politics at work or with friends in the immediate aftermath of critical events. Critical events are defined as those that unsettle everyday life and politics, forcing citizens to re-think their political assumptions and taken for granted, tacit beliefs about the world, albeit often only on a temporary basis (Das, 1995). Such events were often hard to talk about. One focus group had to be interrupted because participants felt unwilling to speak about sensitive events after the 7/7 London bombings in 2005. Collaborative media ethnography with multilingual and especially British Muslim citizens demonstrated how news media consumption is intrinsic to living and doing citizenship. News media consumption enables young people to acquire discursive competences in discussing news events and, as a consequence, develop an understanding of what politics is—graduating to adult status among family and friends (Gillespie, 1995). By the 2000s the widespread availability of satellite and internet media offered multi-lingual and diasporic audiences the opportunity to compare and contrast international news sources’ framing of events and thus relativise UK mainstream media. Collective discussion and analysis of news and political events has always enabled citizens to identify the public problems of the day, to receive political information and analysis, and ideas and ideals of ‘the good citizen’ are often presented to citizens by entertainment and news media (Livingstone, 2005; van Zoonen, 2005). David Buckingham (2000, p. 59) argues that if news media address audiences in ways that assume the latter possess media and political literacies, this positions individuals as ‘citizens-in-the-making’ and can contribute to the skills and competences young people need to be politically efficacious citizens. Young people wish to

120



be engaged, hate being patronised, and some reporters do show how events ‘out there’ are relevant to audience members’ lives. This invites conversation around news, through which repertoires are formed. In a previous multi-ethnic audience study on responses to the mediation of the attacks of 9/11 Gillespie identified the ways in which ‘negotiations of the meanings of events, identities and relationships in the social world are enacted in the “talking spaces” created around television among other sources of news in everyday life’. (Gillespie, 2006, p. 906). Hence, the Shifting Securities ethnographers asked participants about their media consumption routines, and what media they turned to when critical events broke, such as the 7/7 bombings or 2004 Boxing Day Asian Tsunami. It is in these spaces that understandings of politics and democracy and repertoires of engagement form (cf. Gillespie, 1995 and Gillespie, 2011; Buckingham, 1996; Buckingham, 1999). The political context of the period of study was shaped markedly by security concerns. Following the 11 September 2001 attacks in the USA and launch of a domestic and international war on terror, some suggested or questioned whether this context was ‘the new normal’ (Abrams et al., 2004; Massumi, 2005, p. 31) in which terrorist attacks would become a regular occurrence: the 7 July 2005 bombings were followed by a second multiple bomb attack on London’s public transport a fortnight later, the 21/7 attacks in which the perpetrators failed to detonate their bombs. Should Londoners expect bombs every other Thursday (O’Loughlin et al., 2011)? A raft of counter-terrorism legislation was introduced in the UK. This affected citizenship: Jarvis and Lister (2010, p. 180) conclude, ‘Governance, in this arena, has been diffused right throughout the social: to the homes, lives and work of “ordinary” individuals and communities’. They add that citizens were not asked to contribute to debates about what counts as security or insecurity; the goals of ‘counter-terrorism’ were set top-down by the state, and citizens were simply asked to contribute to the delivery of those pre-defined goals, a rather impoverished conception of citizenship. In other words, security was taken out of the realm of legitimate political debate. At the same time, other insecurities concerned citizens. Economic struggles, family dislocations, fear of crime and other anxieties meant what one participant called ‘a thousand pinpricks of insecurity’ and that relativised the significance of the threat of terrorism to any individual (Al Ghabban, 2007; Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2007, pp. ix–x). A sense of ‘precarious citizenship’ was the result of this (Gillespie and O’Loughlin, 2009a,b). For older generations of minority ethnic or religious people in the UK, citizenship became precarious objectively. Citizenship in the UK since the 2002 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act is a privilege, not a right; it not only has to be ‘earned’ but protected and maintained. The 2006 Terrorism Bill, the Home Office states, ‘enable[s] British citizenship to be


121


removed where it is considered conducive to the public good, rather than, as previously, where the individual has done something seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the UK’ (Home Office, cited in Gillespie and O’Loughlin, 2009a,b; cf Blake, 2006). Citizenship has become contingent, and we might expect this to be felt by those under public or state scrutiny. Citizenship also became more precarious subjectively, in the everyday experience of having one’s loyalty or identity questioned. These individuals had associated British citizenship and its attainment as a matter of hope and pride. New security legislation and harassment by police and customs officials created a sense of disillusionment and disappointment. This was communicated to younger generations. However, whereas older participants spoke of the possibility of returning to a country of origin, this option was not thinkable to younger participants who had been born and raised in the UK. The disappointment expressed by their parents was another layer of context within which young people assessed their political options. Benign resignation was not an option; young people sought a more active, dissenting response. Having to take into account older generations’ views and reflect on oneself and one’s experiences within that broader identity group is a prerequisite to political consciousness (Buckingham, 2000, p. 205). Precarious citizenship forced individuals to respond, and one response we found was what Sunaina Marr Maira (2009) calls ‘dissenting citizenship’. It is useful to bring our study into comparative focus with that of Maira’s (2009), as there are important resonances. She conducted ethnographic research prior to ours from 2001 to 2003 in a New England town she calls ‘Wellford’, and in particular a high school there. She described the school as very multicultural: 40 per cent of students were white and the rest a mix, with 20 per cent born overseas. Wellford had experienced two waves of immigrants from South Asia, the latter taking working and lower middle class jobs; in particular, Muslim family networks from Gujarat had been transported from a village to a Wellford apartment block. Her aim was to explore how young South Asian Muslim immigrants expressed ideas of national belonging and citizenship in the context of the war on terror. The puzzle she posed starkly was: How can you live somewhere where people consider you an enemy? How would this affect South Asian young people’s sense of loyalty, security and belonging? And, we would add, can dissenting voices be treated as legitimate and valuable by political leaders or fellow citizens within democratic conversation? Maira found the young people in Wellford were in the position of ‘challenging the state while seeking inclusion within it’ (2009, p. 201). For example, in 2001 and 2002 they were critical of US policy-makers’ decision to go to war in Afghanistan. They felt Afghanistan’s culpability for the 11 September 2001 attacks had not been established, and disappointment that the USA was falling short of justice, accountability and international law. Nevertheless, this suggests they had

122



expected the USA to meet these benchmarks—that the starting point was an assumption the USA could and should meet such standards. Regarding domestic or homeland security, the young South Asians in Maira’s study described a ‘gap between what the state can presumably guarantee, through citizenship or constitutional rights, and what a specific political project such as the War on Terror actually puts into effect’ (2009, p. 205). It is in the uncertain context of this gap that young people had to decide how to act. We hope that an ethnographic approach helps the reader identify how young people understood such a context, made decisions and used certain repertoires to engage. ‘Dissenting citizenship’ is Maira’s term for the effects of the ambivalent and contradictory positioning experienced by young South Asians in the USA. It is conceptually and empirically similar to what Gillespie (1995) found among young British Muslims in Southall, west London in response to Gulf War 1991. They responded strategically in ways that required regular switching between cultural codes, between home and school. Individuals had to strike a between dissent and accommodation. To an extent people want to live in peace, so dissent is at times muted; at other times dissent is vocalised or acted on. Ethnography allows participants to describe how they do this, what competences and difficulties are involved and what successes they have had. Dissenting citizenship is an attitude of frustration but hope. It often entails expectations of economic opportunity, cultural belonging and legal status that are not being fully realised. Our analysis develops the concept of dissenting citizenship in a UK context by exploring how young British Muslims responded. Our study extends previous findings that citizens are committed to the idea of democracy but aware of culturally distinctive approaches and meaning of the term and critical of its current practices in the ‘west’. Individuals wish to engage politically but face uncertainty about the efficacy of their options (Norris, 1999), where efficacy is understood as ‘people’s beliefs in their ability to understand and participate effectively in governance’ (Coleman et al., 2008, p. 771). By taking into account the security context, we shed light on certain obstacles faced that have yet to be accounted for in the civic and political engagement field. In the analysis below we find that many young Muslim interviewees were focused on finding alternative forms of representation and action. The pull towards politics was there, since existing political representatives and representations were deemed inadequate, but this lack presented certain choices: to work in and reinvigorate existing party politics or bureaucratic politics, or to work outside; to work within and attempt to alter the agendas and news values of existing media organisations or to set up Islamic media. Navigating this terrain was difficult, and dissent was often felt not to be registered or acted upon, but the political imaginary of a national, democratic political system remained present for some.


2.

123

The perseverance of national thinking


Young British Muslims are in ongoing negotiation with a notional mainstream or majority society. They are not alone in this, but after 9/11 and then 7/7 their inclusion/exclusion became a public issue. Comparative ethnography helps illuminate how young people become made as national citizens through media. As part of our collaborative ethnography Habiba Noor (2007) conducted a series of exercises with school students in London and New York, helping them use moviemaking software to create 60 second audio-visual news clips about the war on terror. Noor made hundreds of images available, which participants selected from, put into a running order, and created a voiceover. Noor wanted to find out how minority audiences see themselves in relation to the majority in each country. In New York, Noor met the students Kit (18 years old) and Kat (16 years old) several times in late 2005. They were Muslim-identifying American citizens with parents of Indian origin, living in a suburb with few South Asians. Their news clip immediately addressed a presumed audience that was ignorant of events in Iraq and of Islam, evidencing a sense of distance from an American mainstream society. Kit and Kat did identify racism from anti-Arab statements at school, but felt such statements stemmed from ignorance rather than media reporting. A sensible political action for them was to try to educate their classmates about religion and world politics. However, there was ambiguity in their news clip too. It ended by paying respects to US soldiers fallen in Iraq, reproducing mainstream US news discourse at the time, yet Kit and Kat were critical of the war. Earlier we noted that Maira observed certain ‘prerequisites for speaking’ that US Arab or Muslim citizens had to perform. Kit and Kat’s anomalous framing of US soldiers as victims supports this. They were enacting a mainstream repertoire as a prerequisite to their longer news clip, as if this military homage must be performed in order to make space to achieve their objective of educating fellow students about religion. Noor concludes, ‘This discrepancy is not a sign of their confusion; rather, it illustrates their multiple identities’ (Maira, 2009, p. 387). Noor spoke to three Muslim students in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, all British nationals but with diverse backgrounds. Jasmine (17 years old, Turkish), Hanan (18 years old, Gujurati Indian) and Sara (18 years old, Yemeni) were far more critical of mainstream media that Kit and Kat. They possessed a greater degree of media literacy and were more familiar with transnational media networks. They presented suffering in Iraq as asymmetrical: Muslims were suffering but USA or UK soldiers were not mentioned as anything other than perpetrators. The London students spoke less of discrimination at school than Kit or Kat, but also presumed a national majority to be ignorant of Muslim suffering. They blamed news media for this. News media omitted the ‘truth’: It did not report Iraqi perspectives or Iraqi casualties in the war. Their

124


3. Pulled and pushed to engage: Government consultation of women in Manchester Government consultation is central to contemporary policy-making. Formal democratic processes like voting may be too crude to diagnose strength of feeling, elicit the voices of those marginalised from typical public debate and provide efficacy


news clip ended by presenting the audience with two options: pray for peace or prepare for more violence. They focused on warning a national audience, while Kit and Kat focused on drawing constructively ‘on the lessons of American history’ such as learning from Japanese internment that small acts of suppression can lead to total restrictions on freedom (Habiba Noor, 2007, p. 385). All could draw on media conventions to express their political arguments and each had a strong sense of a national mainstream and how it should be addressed. They exhibited the dual discursive competencies found by Gillespie (1995) among young people in Southall and by Maira (2009) in New England. Some young Muslim Londoners among the Shifting Securities participants did take up political action. Again in Tower Hamlets, the ethnographer Ammar Al-Ghabban found among groups of 14 – 16-year-old British Bengali Muslims that many of the children had attended anti-war demonstrations in 2003. ‘When the bombing of Baghdad began’, he writes, ‘some even left school in the middle of a working day (without their parents’ knowledge) to march in protest from East London to Parliament Square’ (Al-Ghabban, 2007, p. 317). Even though they did not speak Arabic they watched Arabic satellite television for visual confirmation of the horror they expected, seeking the ‘truth’ Jasmine, Hanan and Sara sought. Al-Ghabban also spoke to white, secular students. Their media menu was narrower and they possessed a more distant relation to the war. He writes, ‘Didactic, one-sided and propagandistic news appeared to provoke the young participants not only to cynicism . . . but also to some of the most ardent critique and political debate, and occasionally practical political intervention, by drawing up or signing petitions and going on demonstrations’ (ibid, p. 325). A more diverse media ecology shaped the social practice of news watching, affording young people in London the opportunity to watch Al-Jazeera, BBC or Fox News, which triggered comparative analysis of national discursive repertoires and stimulated political action. Hence, efforts to construct more adequate representation also demand consideration about how these representations will be received and understood by others. In the next section we explore how some young people felt pushed or pulled into engagement with political processes, and in the final section we return to the problem of constructing alternative media representations in order to engage and education mainstream society.


125


to those who are most affected by a decision. Locally oriented consultations allow those directly affected by existing or proposed policy to feedback in various ways. The existence of consultations is about both input and output; drawing in local perspectives, knowledge and information and enrolling citizens within a deliberative process so that those citizens are receptive to, and might even help implement, any resulting decision. The policy project in question here was soliciting the views of British Muslim women. Following the introduction of top-down and community-level counter-terrorism policies (for an overview see Jarvis and Lister, 2010), such audiences appeared, from the perspective of the British government in the mid-2000s, to be an identity/interest group who required consulting. The network society described by Castells (2009) reconfigures and renews structural exclusions; unless a person has value to a network (economic, social) then they will find no place. Paradoxically, the media-security nexus suddenly afforded high value to British Muslims. Suddenly, being consulted was an ambiguous opportunity: we will listen, because you are dangerous. Such consultation may be transient, no guarantee of an enduring place within governance. As Castells writes, value is . . . an expression of power. Whoever holds power . . . decides what is valuable (2009, p. 28; italics in original). The government was still deciding policy objectives and hence what counted as valuable. Consultations were launched by government, not by citizens. In 2005, after the 7/7 London bombings in July, the ethnographer Asad Iqbal met with a group of three young Muslim female students living in Oldham but studying in Manchester. Reshma, 21 years old, Bina, 21 years old, and Sofie, 19 years old, were all involved in various Islamic societies at their universities. They were all of Bangladeshi origin. Reshma, Bina and Sofie were aware of physical violence targeted against Muslim women. They recounted instances of women being physically attacked and their own efforts to get better security arrangements around the university where these attacks took place. One of the discussants had herself been approached by two men with a dog who asked her if she had a ‘bomb in her bag’. They were pushed to act politically, complaining to the university. They were also pulled into political engagement. This group had had some involvement in government consultation. They had recently met with Hazel Blears, a Minister in the Labour government, as part of the government’s drive to consult with Muslim communities (BBC News, 2005). They had been interviewed by news media journalists after the consultation. They found this process quite tough, because the media personnel were looking for answers to very specific questions about the government’s agenda and they did not know how to answer such questions. Responding to journalists’ agenda was one problem. Another was the representative function of the commission. Reshma felt anger towards a Muslim woman on a government-sponsored commission for failing to represent the

126


perspective of Reshma and other Muslim women at ‘grassroots level’. Her palpable frustration is worth quoting at length:

With a spatial understanding of political community, Reshma adds that these women came from the area originally but ‘once they go’, they become disembedded experts—‘feminists’ indeed—who can no longer represent that community’s interests or identity. Indeed, if they returned they ‘will be kicked out straight away’. This feeling of inadequate representation overlapped with her self-determination to undertake political work in her community herself. Reshma was carrying out her own governance project, consulting and mediating the interests and opinions of Bangladeshi women more excluded than herself; an alternative or counter-network to the government-led initiative (Castells, 2009, p. 48), based around an alternative agenda of opportunity rather than war-on-terror security: [You must] battle it all the way through this women’s commission and just generally, just ‘cause I’m doing a project currently on women’s


The government, they listen to people who are leaders, who have higher status, who stand out in the community, but they [the leaders] don’t actually represent the community . . . the government, I’m really annoyed with them because they don’t actually go out there to find out what’s happening in the grassroots level work doing this commission thing. They said this is the way to go to the grassroots level but still I see this women’s commission . . . there’s some feminists, women I was so annoyed [with] . . . some of the comments they were coming out with, I was like hey, you’re supposed to be representing Muslim women here aren’t you? The comments they were coming out with and the ideas about what they should do, and what Muslim women should do and I was like hey, you’re actually going beyond the boundaries of Islam here now and you’re supposed to be, supposed to be representing Muslims here. Now the policies the government is going to make is going to be based on your findings and this is what you’re basing your arguments on, and this is what you’re saying? And I was just like, if you as feminists come to our community and suggest your ideas . . . you will be kicked out straight away because they will look at you, look at you, they will see you as women and they will see you coming up with these western ideas, feminism, this and that, feminism . . . they were extreme, proper extreme and I was like how can you say you represent me, or how can you say you represent us when you don’t actually represent us, and this is what I feel, they’re not, we’re not represented at all . . . I’m just really annoyed with it, really annoyed with all this, and it’s just what can . . . you can’t give up . . .


127

opportunities in the community, and Muslim women, Bangladeshi women, there’s hardly anything [for them] out there. So I’ve just been doing all this research interviewing women who think, think that they actually do not have any choice, can’t do anything, men who are leaders of these community schemes, they don’t actually care, that’s just been, that’s why I’m a bit fumed up, sorry . . .

when [Muslim women] do wish to speak out against anti-Muslim discrimination and harassment, they do so with the encouragement and support of Muslim communities, but are too often treated with hostility or indifference by those outside those communities. On the other hand, if they wish to speak about dysfunctional gender norms within Muslim communities, they have little difficulty in finding an audience among nonMuslims, but their voices are appropriated and woven into anti-Muslim discourse, and they risk being labelled as disloyal by some members of their own communities. (Hussein, 2008, cited in Dreher, 2009, p. 4) In her US study, Maira found that some women were invited to be photographed for magazine covers as, effectively, signifiers of ‘moderate’ or safe Muslims—to become ‘a poster child in [a] project of defining Muslim American citizenship’ (2009, p. 233). This ‘seemed to rest on a need to prove allegiance and assimilation


Such representative work for those less expert or less able to represent themselves is not new. In Southall in the early 1990s Gillespie found there were always the ‘Chust’ (or smart) young people who became expert mediators and cultural brokers between parents and peers, and across state/public and private/family domains. This comes out of necessity, part of the self-reliance developed in migrant families and networks. Reshma feels she is at the ‘grassroots’ level, unlike the ‘feminists’ she criticised earlier. However, she feels she failed to bring these grassroots perspectives to government, through the Blears consultation; she couldn’t work on the terms expected by national journalists and politicians. Having voice is not enough, in any case. For many British Muslims, having the opportunity to speak does not equate with a feeling of being listened to. Giving voice to the voiceless is pointless if the voice goes unheard. Political efficacy—the sense that one’s political actions are followed by a response from leaders or authorities—is short-circuited. A lack of response may only generate frustration in the speaker, who may choose exit and disconnection rather than express a voice within and loyalty to the national public sphere (cf. Hirschman, 1970). For instance, gender structures the capacity to speak and be heard. There was much attention on giving voice to Muslim women both at home and in justifications for interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, taking a position in public may create difficult trade-offs:

128


4. Should we join mainstream parties/media or launch separate parties/media? A recurring finding was that young people who had been asked to speak to media felt ‘burnt’. Reshma’s experience was not isolated. A common complaint was the journalists had predefined stories and only spoke to those who would fit that story, either by representing a particular visual appearance or by putting across a point of view the journalist wanted. Following the 7/7 London bombings the ethnographer Asad Iqbal spoke to a group of five young men in Oldham—Abu Hamza (31), Rahal Khaliq (22), Salman Mather (31), Ahmad (22), Abdus Saboor (24)—all of Bangladeshi origin, who worked together in a voluntary capacity in an Islamic organisation. Iqbal reported that they felt that the stigmatisation of Muslims was a deliberate media strategy. One of them gave an example of how he felt such stigmatisation had affected the children he was working with as a teacher. They spoke of being afraid and knowing others who were afraid. They found themselves in an extensive form of engagement with the content of the critique of the Muslim community through media whether this was to do with Muslims and terrorism or the clothing of Muslim women. But they also had personal experience of being consulted by journalists. This group of young men had been interviewed numerous times by various media outlets. Their contrasting experiences with news journalists and documentary makers indicate both their expectations and hopes but also their frustrations:4 Iqbal: Have any of you been interviewed by the media? Abdus: (Laughs) We have. 4

Shifting Securities, Strand A, AI1, lines 138– 150. See also IA2 lines 151– 162, IA4 lines 90– 97, AI6 lines 89–103.


into the nation based on a staging of cultural familiarity and translation of cultural unfamiliarity (particularly the “hijab”)’ (ibid). It is the moment government has designated to ‘listen’. In summary, young women like Reshma chose to operate tactically and pragmatically seeking to effect changes in everyday life. For those seeking to influence national policy, government and media set the opportunities, timing and terms of engagement. Muslim women faced the twin forces of exoticisation and vilification, manifest in the experience of being spat at on the street as well as through media treatment. This pushed individuals into reclaiming and remaking citizenship on their own terms, as Reshma did in her own community. For British Muslim males the debates and responses to the media-security nexus often took a rather different form.


129

Iqbal: How has that affected your view of them? Abdus: You see when they the questioning is different when they first approach you for the questioning its very very nice, they treat you so well but it’s only when they turn the camera on they ask you that’s it a dagger through your heart. Ahmad: These people are very well trained. Iqbal: So you were saying about documentaries . . .

Salman: Once we were interviewed by a particular channel and there were sisters and brothers amongst us and the questions they were asking us they were very general, you know, what do you think about this and that, and the questions they were asking sisters [. . .] they wanna hear what they want, you know, something about oppression. They tried cornering the sisters in front of the brothers so they can say this is what’s happening, it’s very very annoying when they do that . . . Journalists were trying to make Muslim women take a public position on gender in their communities, which creates a difficult set of trade offs. Some participants spoke of complaining to media organisations when journalists ignored moderate Muslims in favour of setting up debates between ‘fiery’ Muslims and secularists.5 Others critiqued the moderate/extremist polarity as being part of the problem and dominant frame of pigeonholing. This exemplifies the intensification of marginalisation and demonisation at times of critical events in the media-security nexus—the reproduction of cycles of exacerbated racism and paradoxes young people had to work with and untangle while holding on to an ethos of dissenting citizenship. Young people also soon learned of the practical difficulties of working with journalists. The conversation continued:

5

Shifting Securities, Strand A, AI6.


Abdus: Yeah, we’ve been interviewed by news reporters and also people who come to do documentaries obviously I know the nature is different but the way they behave towards you is big different [. . .] The documentaries they’re very relaxed they try to find out about all the different kind of views that you have but when it comes to news journalists they will angle it in a way that they wanna corner you and they will get from you what they want to hear.

130


Rahal: Me, Channel Four, they did an interview with us straight after the riots, they spent about twelve hours with us and they didn’t even show it, it was quite frustrating. For twelve hours they followed us around and everything, do ten shots like walking up the street, it was quite frustrating they were following us around and they didn’t even show it in the media. What was the point of that? After that I’m not too keen.

NM: So, for Sami what makes you motivated to take part in the elections? Or expressing your political voice? SS: Maybe if it is a Muslim country, or party. SH: Can Muslims launch their own party, can they do that? AAh: No one will prevent you. NM: You can do it. SH: So why [then] Muslims do not unite and establish their own Islamic party? AAh: How many Muslims are there any way? WR: What’s your definition of an Islamic party? SH: I don’t mean that something according to sharia, but Muslims getting together, why not Muslims are coming with a party like Respect? To have a Muslim candidate? 6

Shifting Securities, Strand A, N2 lines 154 –176.


These structural difficulties led participants to consider strategic possibilities for countering misrepresentation and the construction of these categorisations in the first place. Kit and Kat wanted to educate the mainstream; Jasmine prayed the majority would get to see the truth of Muslim suffering; the young men in Northern England Iqbal spoke to trace a direct line between media stigmatisation of Muslims and fear present within Muslim communities. Would it be better to operate within the mainstream to change the mainstream, or challenge the mainstream by creating Muslim media or political parties? Nourredine Miladi spoke to a group of young Muslim students in London who reflected on this dilemma. Ahmed Aidarus (24), Rashid (25), Ali Ahwazi (23), Abu Rashid (22), Sami Said (22) and Wahid Rahimdil (24) were a mix of UK and non-UK citizens6 talking about the 5 May 2005 UK General Election. The interview was on 15 May, with Tony Blair re-elected as Prime Minister, to the consternation of those opposed to the Iraq War and war on terror policies:


131

NM: Who can answer this question? Ahmed maybe. SH: I mean does the law permit such a thing? AAh: That will be hard. SH: I mean is it permissible. AAh: The problem is that Muslims in this country are a minority. Even a majority of Muslims voted for that party, what they are going to get, five seats? SH: Even one seat.

NM: But the voting system in this country is so complex that it is not easy to win. SH: Okay, in Bethnal Green Muslims are 40 per cent they can win. AAh: But how many other constituencies in the country have that majority? It’s a good idea but at the end of the day it will not have effect on the political structure. This conversation illustrates young people exploring logics of identity and representation and numbers as they seek avenues for participation in democratic politics. The opposition to the Iraq war provided by the Respect Party had shown many participants that alternative voices could receive public attention within British political culture. The fact that the question arose of whether a Muslim party would be permitted by law characterises the security context after the 7/7 bombings. Indeed, security concerns were an obstacle to creating Muslim media. Young people spoke of surveillance and the danger of setting up websites.7 Hence, the security context could either push young people into the mainstream or disconnect them from the public sphere. Indeed, the views of some participants on the London bombings or state security policy led them to self-censor and, in some cases, retreat into Muslim-only spaces of political and public debate (Gillespie and O’Loughlin, 2009a,b). Such self-exclusion is one more aspect of fragility in how citizenship was lived and experienced. That some citizens feel pushed out of the public arena harms pluralism and diversity in political debate, fragments publics and diminishes capacities for participatory democracy. The experience of poverty and feeling pushed away from political engagement even led to some young participants living in 7

Shifting Securities, Strand A, AI6 lines 90–97.


AAh: You cannot, comparing two million people with 60.

132


London, in the context of the media-security nexus of this period, developing apocalyptic beliefs in which they conflated fears of natural disasters and terrorist attacks and spoke of themselves as passive and ready to die in the face of such global forces (Al-Ghabban, 2007). Such divergent responses underscore the importance of continued engagement and public connection. 5.

Conclusions


The Shifting Securities media ethnography makes clear that citizenship is experienced through a series of inter-related paradoxes: logics of representative government versus rolling consultation on policy output and implementation; what the state should do and is doing; being stigmatised as a security threats while also fearing further terrorist attacks; and what citizens say to researchers against what they feel and do on a daily basis. There is no doubt that the development of young people’s political repertoires in this period was shaped by the mediasecurity nexus. That context included the sense of loss and disappointment expressed by older generations as they experienced a more precarious citizenship. Without a ‘home’ country to consider returning to, young people had to consider options for engaging UK mainstream politics. Feeling demonised by media and political statements and everyday racism, it was in their interests to engage the mainstream and change this situation. Dissenting citizenship is an expectant citizenship, not a revolutionary citizenship. It is also a national citizenship. It is not a call for a new regime altogether. Dahlgren might argue that a general lack of efficacy in contemporary politics is ‘the psychic devastation of late modernity’ (2009: 17), but among young people at least there remains a desire and assumption that there can and should be a democratic mainstream, despite diasporic relations, transnational media and the disappointment of the 2003 Iraq War. Media are both opportunity and obstacle in these processes. On the one hand, young people gain skills and knowledge through their media engagements, boosting media literacy, seeing themselves positioned as expert ‘citizensin-the-making’ (Buckingham, 2000: 59). Kit and Kat crafted their news clip to appeal to an imagined national audience, while Jasmine, Hanan and Sara compared and contrasted transnational news in order to debate presumed effects on mainstream audiences and how to counter these. On the other hand, participants experienced negative personal experiences with journalists and expressed frustration at the stereotypes media structure news around. It is these frustrations that drove participants to remedy perceived failings of media and political representation, whether by trying to educate school friends or enter journalism and party politics. Many older participants in the Shifting Securities study expressed a cynical attitude to news, regarding it as biased and not worth engaging with.


133


But the younger sample analysed here still seek a more critical engagement (Buckingham, 2000)—they have not given up on news media and actively discussed strategies for reforming it. What are the implications of our findings for the study of young people and participation generally? Set against the experiences of young people in the UK, the experiences of young Muslims have commonalities and particularities. News media can address young people as tomorrow’s citizens, or ‘citizens-in-the-making’, but recent research indicates young people as a category are represented in negative ways (Wayne et al., 2010). Young people are most frequently in news related to crime or violence, disproportionately to their actual involvement. Young people themselves notice this negative representation, leading to cynicism and mistrust towards mainstream news media which, we might infer, may inform their relation to mainstream politics too (Youth Citizenship Commission, 2009). This pattern is intensified in the case of young Muslims, whose identity is already challenged as religion and terrorism are routinely connected in the media-security nexus. The difficulty of achieving the requisite competencies and repertoires to make oneself heard in media and political engagements is also likely to be common to young people but intensified for ethnic and religious minority groups who become expert mediators and cultural brokers between parents and peers, across state/public and private/family domains and across national/English and international/multilingual media. These skills and experiences suggest young Muslims might show high levels of political dexterity, patience and understanding as the current generation of young people move into political activities at all levels in the 2010s and 2020s. The expression of legitimate dissent has only become a more pressing matter for young people since the Shifting Securities project ended in 2007. In April 2011 Patrick Mercer OBE, Conservative MP for Newark and member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Transatlantic and International Security, warned that the three security threats facing Britain are Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism, violence ‘attached’ to student protests and ‘Irish terrorists’ attacking the royal wedding (Mercer, 2011). Drawing an equivalence between students and those engaged in terrorism cannot inspire confidence in young people that a diversity of views are welcome in democratic conversation. In addition, the latest version of Prevent, the UK government’s counter-terrorism strategy, has switched attention from addressing violent extremism to simply extremism. Extremism is understood as divergence from ‘mainstream British values’, defined as ‘democracy, rule of law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and the rights of all men and women to live free from persecution of any kind’ (Home Office, 2011, p. 34). Prevent calls for greater surveillance of student political activities ‘on campuses’ and for staff to offer ‘support’ to those who may be drawn to extremism. Prevent urges the monitoring of potential extremism across all

134


sectors. What was mainly a media-security nexus is projected across public and private institutions—adding precarity to the everyday lives of those who may feel their views stifled. However, new imaginaries may have emerged too. After the Arab Spring, the figure of the protestor seeking a national democratic system is a category in daily news media. Given the importance of transnational media menus to diasporic and increasingly mainstream audiences, young people in Britain may be inspired to protest for a more democratic system too. On the other hand, the England riots of summer 2011 offer a more alarming figure—the alienated and even nihilistic young person entirely outside of politics.

We are also indebted to the ethnographers project: Ammar Al Ghabban, Habiba Noor, Akil N. Awan, Noureddine Miladi, Karen Herbert, Sadaf Rivzi, Somnath Batabyal, Awa

on the ESRC Shifting Securities Awa Hassan Ahmed, Asad Iqbal, Qureshi, Zahbia Yousuf, David Al Hassan and Olivia Allison.

Funding The Shifting Securities project was funded by the ESRC as part of the New Security Challenges research programme (Award Ref RES-223-25-0063). See http://www. esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/my-esrc/Grants/RES-223-25-0063/read. The research was based at the Centre of Research on Socio-Cultural Change at The Open University (www.cresc.ac.uk) and led by Marie Gillespie. Appendix Summary of demographic information (total: 239 respondents) Table 1 Frequency Percentage Gender Male Female Age 0– 17 18–24 25–34 35–44

100 139

41.8 58.2

44 44 58 38

18.4 18.4 24.3 15.9 Continued


Acknowledgements


135

Table 1 Continued Frequency Percentage

a

27 18 10

11.3 7.5 2.4

36 166 17 2 11 7

15.1 69.5 7.1 0.8 4.6 2.9

57 2 17

23.8 0.8 7.1

Includes Afghanistan and Turkey.

References Abrams, C. B., Albright, K. and Panofsky, A. (2004) ‘Contesting the New York Community: From liminality to the “New Normal” in the Wake of September 11’, City and Community, 3, 189 –220. Al-Ghabban, A. (2007) ‘Global Viewing in East London: Multi-ethnic Youth Responses to Television News’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10, 311–326. BBC News (2005, August 2) ‘Blears Seeks to Reassure Muslims’, accessed at http://news. bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4736969.stm on October 1, 2011. Blake, N. (2006, April 25) ‘Why is There No Song and Dance about This Act?’ The Times, accessed at http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article1082946.ece on October 1, 2011. Buckingham, D. (1996) Moving Images: Understanding Children’s Emotional Responses to Television, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Buckingham, D. (1999) ‘Young People, Politics and News Media: Beyond Political Socialisation’, Oxford Review of Education, 25, 171– 184. Buckingham, D. (2000) The Making of Citizens: Young People, News and Politics, London, Routledge. Castells, M. (2009) Communication Power, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Coleman, S., Morrison, D. and Svennevig, M. (2008) ‘New Media and Political Efficacy’, International Journal of Communication, 2, 771 –791. Das, V. (1995) Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India, New Delhi, Oxford University Press.


45–54 55–64 65+ Religion Christian Muslim Hindu Jewish No religion Unknown Place of birth if not UK South Asia East Asia Middle Easta

136


Dreher, T. (2009) ‘Eavesdropping with Permission: The Politics of Listening for Safer Speaking Spaces’, Borderlands, 8, accessed at http://www.borderlands.net.au/ vol8no1_2009/dreher_eavesdropping.pdf on October 1, 2011. Eliasoph, N. (1998) Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Gillespie, M. (1995) Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change, London, Routledge. Gillespie, M. (2006) ‘Guest Editor, Transnational Television Audiences after September 11’, Special Issue of Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 32, 903–921.

Gillespie, M. (ed) (2007b) ‘Security, Media and Multicultural Citizenship’, Special Issue of European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10, 3. Gillespie, M. (2011) ‘Our Ground Zeros: Competing Perspectives on the Attacks of 11th September 2001 among Transnational TV Audiences’. In B., Zelizer and S., Allen (eds) Journalism After September 11 2001, revised edition, London and New York, Routledge. Gillespie, M. and O’Loughlin, B. (2009a) ‘Precarious Citizenship: Media and Insecurity in Multicultural Britain’. In Noxolo, P. and Huysmans, J. (eds) Community, Citizenship and the ‘War on Terror’, Basingstoke, Palgrave. Gillespie, M. and O’Loughlin, B. (2009b) ‘News Media, Threats and Insecurities: An Ethnographic Approach’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 22, 667–686. Halperin, S. and Heath, O. (2011 forthcoming) Political Research: Methods and Applied Skills, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Hay, C., Stoker, G. and Williamson, A. (2008) ‘Revitalising Politics: Have We Lost the Plot?’, Paper Presented to the ‘Revitalising Politics’ Conference, Westminster, 5 –6 November 2008, accessed at http://revitalisingpolitics.files.wordpress.com/2008/ 09/revitalising-politics-position-paper.pdf on October 2011. Hirschman, A. O. (1970) Exit, Voice, and Loyalty; Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. Home Office (2011) Prevent Strategy, CM 8092, London, HM Government. Hoskins, A. and O’Loughlin, B. (2007) Television and Terror: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse, Basingstoke, Palgrave. Jarvis, L. and Lister, M. (2010) ‘Stakeholder Security: The New Western Way of CounterTerrorism?’, Contemporary Politics, 16, 173 –188. Livingstone, S. (ed.) (2005) Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere, Bristol, Intellect Press. Maira, S. (2009) Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire after 9/11, Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2005) ‘Fear (the Spectrum Said)’, Positions, 13, 31 –48.


Gillespie, M. (2007a) Shifting Securities: News Cultures Before and Beyond the Iraq Crisis 2003: Non-Technical Summary (Research Summary), ESRC End of Award Report, RES-223-25-0063, Swindon, ESRC.


137

Mercer, P. (2011) Speech on panel, ‘Counter Terrorism Strategies for an Unstable and Uncertain World’, Counter Terror Expo, London, 25 –26.4.11. http://www. counterterrorexpo.com/page.cfm/action=Seminars/SeminarID=226 Noor, H. (2007) ‘Assertions of Identities through News Production: News-making among Teenage Muslim Girls in London and New York’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10, 374 –388. Norris, P. (ed) (1999) Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic Government, Oxford, Oxford University Press. O’Loughlin, B., Bordeau, C. and Hoskins, A. (2011) ‘Distancing the Extraordinary: Audience Understandings of Discourses of “Radicalization”’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 25, 153 –164.

Ward, J. and de Vreese, C. (2011) ‘Political consumerism, young citizens and the Internet’, Media, Culture & Society, 33, 399 –413. Wayne, M., Petley, J., Murray, C. and Henderson, L. (2007) Television News, Politics and Young People, Basingstoke, Palgrave. Youth Citizenship Commission (2009) Making the Connection: Building Youth Citizenship in the UK, Final Report of the Youth Citizenship Commission, accessed at http://www.teachingcitizenship.org.uk/dnloads/youth_commisoners_final_report_ dated_09.pdf on October 1, 2011. Zoonen, L. van (2005) Entertaining the citizen: when politics and popular culture converge, Boulder, CO, Rowman and Littlefield.


Putnam, R. D. (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York, NY, Simon and Schuster.