An ‘unfathomable hatred of Islam’: Ethno/graphing the trial for the Québec City mosque massacre

Abstract

On the night of January 29, 2017, six Muslim worshippers were killed, and many others severely injured when a white man opened fire at a mosque in Québec City (QC, Canada). This article is based on a collective ethno/graphy of the assailant’s trial, from its beginning in March 2018 until the verdict in February 2019. During this period, our research group – formed of three sociologists and a visual artist – attended trial hearings at the Superior Court of Québec and collected related media coverage and political statements. To analyze the legal, political, and media treatment of the 2017 massacre, we put forth a political ethnography of justice, informed by critical scholarship on depoliticization and epistemologies of white ignorance. Our analysis identifies distinct sequences in a process of depoliticization that obscures historical, structural, and political dimensions of anti-Muslim violence. In attending to this process, our article advances sociological research on the institutional treatment, and concealment, of religiously and racially targeted violence.