The Geography of Islamophobia in Sydney: mapping the spatial imaginaries of young Muslims

Abstract

ABSTRACTA rise in anti-Muslim sentiment in the ‘West’ has invoked wide debate on the impacts of Islamophobia on Australian Muslim citizens. Noble and Poynting (‘White Lines: The Intercultural Politics of Everyday Movement in Social Spaces’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 31 (2010): 489–505) speculated that racism impacts young Muslims’ sense of belonging in and across public spheres. Despite Australian Muslim testimonials of racial experiences occurring in the public space, the impact of racism on how ethnic and/or religious minorities, such as Muslims, translate this sentiment into mental maps of exclusion has not hitherto been empirically examined. This paper reports on the findings of an online survey conducted in July 2014 with young Australian Muslims living in Sydney. Young Muslims suggest that there is a geographical distribution of Islamophobic spaces across Sydney, focused in the regions of Sutherland, Sydney’s North Side/Eastern Suburbs, and the Upper North Shore. In comparing young Muslims’ ‘mental maps’ of Islamophobia and existing evidence of Sydney’s ‘geographies of racial attitudes’ illustrated by Forrest and Dunn in 2007 (‘Constructing Racism in Sydney, Australia’s Largest EthniCity’, Urban Studies 44 (2007): 699–721), the need for culturally specific, empirical examinations of (in)tolerance across Australian cities is emphasised.