About
The first generation of Australians born around 9/11 2001 are coming of age. Combining interviews with innovative storytelling workshops in Sydney schools and universities, this project aims to provide the first comparison of the generational and racialized impact of the global ‘War on Terror’ on Muslim and non-Muslim youth born into a post 9/11 world by focusing on their trust relations, political consciousness and fears.
Part of this project involved writing workshops at schools across Sydney. Writing tasks ranged from ‘stream of consciousness’ style exercises, to narratives written in response to visual and written prompts. The project took youth testimonies seriously, encouraging students to tell their stories on their own terms. The purpose of this website is to offer the students a sense of empowerment by sharing their work with a wider audience and having their stories and views heard and acknowledged.
To protect the anonymity of students and schools who participated in the project, I have assigned pseudonyms to the stories but disclosed the author’s age, suburb and religious and ethnic background. These variables have been chosen as this is a comparative project which emerges specifically because the ‘Muslim Other’ has been the core nexus of concern in the context of the ‘War on Terror’ and an epoch of global Islamophobia. I am conscious, however, that I am using ‘Muslim’ and ‘non-Muslim’ youth as broad categories. My focus is on Muslims as a racialized collective, not as a faith community per se. Further, my project explores how these racialized collective identities intersect with other layers of identity. Hence, while Muslim/non-Muslim is the primary axis of comparison, I am mindful that other layers of identity and axes of marginalisation, such as ethnicity, gender, class, geography etc, intersect with this core focus.
Bio:
Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah is a post-doctoral research fellow (Discovery Early Career Research Award) in the Department of Sociology at Macquarie University researching the generational impact of the war on terror on Muslim and non-Muslim youth born into a post 9/11 world. Adopting qualitative and ethnographic methods in everyday contexts, Randa’s research interests broadly centre on critical race studies, race and ethnic relations, (particularly the spatial, embodied and material aspects of racism and Islamophobia), ‘everyday multiculturalism’, and youth identities in the context of the war on terror and the geopolitics of fear.
Randa is also a prominent Australian Muslim and Palestinian advocate and is well known for her media commentary as a public intellectual. The author of 11 novels published and translated in over 20 countries, Randa writes across a wide range of genres and actively seeks to translate her academic work into creative interventions which reshape dominant narratives around race, human rights and identity in popular culture. Her work has been adapted to the stage and performed in Australia, the US and Europe. With funding by Screen Australia, Randa has adapted her debut award-winning novel, Does My Head Look Big In This?, to a major feature film and has incorporated findings from her current research project into the film. Randa is regularly invited as a guest speaker at writer’s festivals around the world where she speaks about her academic research, creative writing and work in schools. She is a Stella Schools Ambassador promoting awareness around gender diversity from an intersectional framework through workshops in Australian schools. She is currently co-editing (with Sara Saleh) an anthology ‘Arab, Australian, Other’, due for publication in 2019.
For Randa’s university profile visit:
https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/persons/randa-abdel-fattah
