Objectives

This work package addresses the more informal understandings about culture that resonate in dominant and majority-oriented public discourses. Cultural identity and ways of dealing with differences will be studied by means of a content analysis of public debates in the mass media on Islam and the integration of Muslim immigrants. Special attention is given to gender, in particular the interface of gender identity with the understandings of other cultural...

Objectives

This work package addresses the more informal understandings about culture that resonate in dominant and majority-oriented public discourses. Cultural identity and ways of dealing with differences will be studied by means of a content analysis of public debates in the mass media on Islam and the integration of Muslim immigrants. Special attention is given to gender, in particular the interface of gender identity with the understandings of other cultural differences. The analysis of public debates also allows for gauging the position of the EU as an actor and Europe as an issue.

Description of work

To gather the relevant content-analytic data, we will follow a two-step procedure, which combines the advantages of automated search and selection of online media sources with the qualitative detail allowed by human coding. In the first step, we will select several national newspapers (available online through sources as Lexis-nexis) and sample from them by relevant keyword searches for each country for the period 2004-2008. From the set of articles thus generated, we will draw a representative sample, which will then in the second step be coded by research assistants. By drawing a representative sample, we ensure that our analyses will not be focused merely on spectacular and perhaps atypical events, but include the everyday debate about the position of Muslims and Islam in Europe. At the same time, our period of study also includes intensely debated, conflict-ridden events such as the bombings in Madrid and London in 2004 and 2005, the murder of Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh in 2004, and the Danish cartoon affair of 2005-2006.

We will look in particular at actors intervening in public debates, the issues they address, their policy positions, the frames they advance, and so forth. Systematic data collection and analysis will be carried in each country based on common guidelines. EURISLAM partner UNIGE (country) coordinates this work package.