The Religious Identity of Young Muslim Women in Berlin offers an in-depth ethnographic account of Muslim youth’s religious identity formation and their everyday life engagement with Islam. It deals with the reconstruction of selfhood and the collective content of identity formation in an urban and transnational setting.

Kulkul presents her ethnographic work with Turkish Muslim women in Berlin as evidence that community is not an entity but is produced by instrumentalizing specific forms of identification and boundary-making. In examining the role of community in the case of her participants, Kulkul finds that religion and culture are important not for the values they perpetuate, but for their role in forming and sustaining the community. She looks at the importance of boundaries and especially their reciprocity. Social boundaries are a set of codes of exclusion often used against migrants and refugees, while symbolic boundaries are typically understood as the way one defines one’s own group. Kulkul argues that these two types of boundaries tend to trigger each other and thus be mutually reinforcing. At the same time, she presents a picture of everyday life from the perspective of migrants and the children of migrants in a cosmopolitan European city – Berlin. A valuable read for scholars of migration and culture, which will especially interest scholars focused on Europe.

The fifth issue of the Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society (J-RaT) centers on the topic of religion, transformation and sex/gender. The focal point will be on religious and cultural transformation processes and their repercussions on gender roles, constructs and representations on the one hand, and on sex and/or gender transformations which are embedded in the context of specific religious traditions on the other. Transformation is understood here as change, alteration and reformatting. The multifaceted connections between religion, transformation and sex/gender are concretized in an abundance of material and symbolic phenomena and are examined starting from different subject-specific and methodical approaches.

Urban spaces have always functioned as cradles and laboratories for religious movements and spiritualities. The urban forms a central and nourishing agent for the creation of new religious expressions, and continually negotiates new ways of being spiritual and establishing spiritual ideas and practices. This book explores the intense and complex interplay between the (post) modern city and new religious and spiritual movement, bringing the city and its annexes into the foreground of current research into religion. It develops a new, ethnography-based analysis of the ways in which the pluralist experience of the "urban" inscribes itself into various religious practices and vice versa: how do religiosity and spirituality appropriate and transform meanings of the urban? It focuses on new religious expressions, cosmologies and ways of life that go beyond established belief systems and religious understandings, and explores new conceptions of the word "urban" in a world of increasingly extended urban environments. The book examines how cities are both considered as sites and sources of spirituality, where the globalization of religions takes place as well as the fact that globalization is linked closely to the process of localization. The socio-cultural and political uniqueness of the specific urban context are analyzed to present an innovative perspective on how the interplay between the urban, spiritual and religious should be understood. This book brings a timely new perspective and will be of interest to academics and students in geography, sociology, urban studies, cultural studies and anthropology, as well as for urban planners and policy makers.

Educational Administration and Leadership Identity Formation explores approaches and issues that arise in leadership identity formation in a variety of educational contexts. Bringing together a range of national and international contributions, this volume provides a global perspective on this multi-dimensional topic. This book examines the theoretical foundations relevant to identity and identity formation, and their implications for researching and teaching in educational administration and leadership. It includes a range of sociological, psychological, political, cultural, and socio--linguistic approaches to examining leadership identity formation. It also addresses models, practices and experiences that vary according to identity politics, cultural difference, and historical and contemporary privilege in leadership identity formation. Working from theoretical and practice-base perspectives, this book will be of great interest for researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and academics, as well as students in teacher education programs and graduate courses in educational administration and leadership, organisational studies, and educational ethics for broad international use.

This book explores how stereotypes of “oppressed Muslim women” feed into the self-representations of women with a Muslim background. The focus is on women active in, and speaking on behalf of, a wide variety of minority self-organisations in the Netherlands and Norway between 1975 and 2010. The author reveals how these women have internalised and appropriated particular stereotypes, and also developed counter-stereotypes about majority Dutch or Norwegian women. She demonstrates, above all, how they have tried time and again to change popular perceptions by providing alternative images of themselves and of Islam, paying particular attention to their attempts to gain access to media debates. Her central argument is that their efforts to undermine stereotypes can be understood as an assertion of belonging in Dutch and Norwegian society and, in the case of women committed to Islam, as a demand for their religion to be accepted. This innovative work provides a “history from below” that makes a valuable contribution to scholarly debates about citizenship as a practice of inclusion and exclusion. Providing new insights into the dynamics between stereotyping and self-representation, it will appeal to scholars of gender, religion, media, and cultural diversity.

In a world where the term Islam is ever-increasingly an inaccurate and insensitive synonym for terrorism, it is unsurprising that many Muslim youth in the West struggle for a viable sense of identity. This book takes up the hotly-debated issue of Muslim youth identity in western countries from the standpoint of popular culture. It proposes that in the context of Islamophobia and pervasive moral panic, young Muslims frame up their identity in relation to external conditions that only see ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims, on both sides of the ideological fence between Islam and the West. Indeed, by attempting to break down the ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ Muslim dichotomy that largely derives from western media reports, as well as political commentary, Muslim Youth in the Diaspora: Challenging Extremism through Popular Culture will enlighten the reader. It illuminates the way in which diasporic Muslim youth engage with, and are affected by, the radical Islamist meta-narrative. It examines their popular culture and online activity, their gendered sense of self, and much more. This original book will be of interest to students and scholars interested in the fields of sociology, cultural studies and social anthropology. It offers a particular focus on Islam for research in youth studies, youth culture, political radicalisation and religious identity. It will also be relevant to the sector of youth and social work, where practitioners seek to build cultural bridges with a new generation.