Faith, Space, and Negotiated Subjectivities: Young Muslims in Suburban Australia

Abstract

This chapter takes up the volume’s broader concern with young people’s identities and subjectivities by looking at the processes of inclusion and exclusion implicated within narratives of post-9/11 Muslim youth identities. Using the locality of Dandenong in outer-suburban Melbourne, Australia, as its focal point, it first examines some of the discursive practices – from the racialized aestheticization of public space to governmental interventions aimed at fashioning young Muslims into good citizens – through which a Muslim youth subject is constructed in this context. It then explores how young people negotiate these subject positionings through ethnographic fieldwork conducted with young Muslims living in Dandenong and neighboring suburbs. Organized around the recurring theme of mobility expressed in the narratives of selfhood and photographic self-portraits created by these young people, this chapter shows how stories about negotiating the local terrain facilitate insights into how young people conceptualize and enact their positionings within local and national social imaginaries. In doing so, it draws particular attention to three interrelated areas of postsecular social transformation shaping the everyday lives of young Muslims in this locality: the changing nature of faith-based public collectivities, mundane challenges to dominant narratives of nationhood, and emerging forms of religiosity.