Abstracts

From 9/11 to Camerons post multiculturalism (2011); British Asian Muslim identities and belonging have increasingly been questioned, stereotyped and vilified. Historically, their identities, agency and belonging formation have been seen in terms of passiveness and identity conflict, whereas, more recently their identities are coming to be seen in the frames of radicalism, fundamentalism, segregation, and disloyalty.In this research, I critically studied the life histories of four British Pakistani Muslim teachers, both male and female, in their educational and social contexts. Data were collected using four ethnographic problem centred interviews for each participant. The study drew on normative ideas from misrecognition theory to build a critical argument about their identities, agency and belonging in Britain. My participants counter performed the naturalised cultural-political, and socio-historical discourses outlined above.Furthermore, I claim that my participants perform multicultural liberal conception of difference about their identities through four specific strategies; performance of interruptive and strategic existentialism; performance of resilience and adaptability; performance of hybridisation and creativity; and the performance of strategic essentialism.My thesis challenges the dominant Western thinking which mainly views religion in terms of belief. I argue that my participants perform religion as culture and practice. My understanding of the participants data is that religion is an identity orientation along with other identities which I reveal through my data analysis.My analysis leads me to a new perception to which I call the participants performance of Multilingual social consciousness. I argue that they perform multilingualism as an engaged plural form of social consciousness that helps them perform their identities in pluralising and synthesising ways, register their belonging in terms of forging and re-forging their cultural and cross-cultural connections, and manifest their politicisation over redistributive justice.I recommend that educators and policy actors should advance civic praxis that opens possibilities for communities and individuals to manifest their belonging in diverse ways.