Call for papers | Journal Performing Islam Special Issue: “Performing Islamophobia” — LIMITE : 20/12/2025
Special Issue Call for Papers
Special Issue: ‘Performing Islamophobia’
A Critical and Anthropological Study of Politics, Poetics and Representation in Europe
Over the past two decades, Islamophobia has evolved beyond discursive prejudice into a complex performative phenomenon, one enacted through politics, law, culture and everyday life. Performing Islamophobia: A Critical Study in Europe seeks to interrogate how anti-Muslim sentiment is not only expressed but also performed, reproduced and normalised through multiple channels of representation, from artistic and media forms to policy frameworks and bureaucratic practices.
This volume aims to bring together interdisciplinary, decolonial and critical perspectives to examine the ways in which Islamophobia operates as a set of performative acts, embodied, institutional and symbolic, that shape both public perception and lived experience. Contributors are invited to explore how Islamophobia manifests in visual and performing arts, film, television, journalism, digital media, literature, popular culture and state mechanisms, including law enforcement, education and immigration policy. The collection is equally concerned with the counter-performances that resist, subvert and expose such practices.
The volume draws inspiration from the works of scholars such as Judith Butler on performativity, Edward Said on Orientalism, Talal Asad on secularism and religious identity, Sara Ahmed on affect and the politics of emotion, and S. Sayyid, Nasar Meer, and Arjun Appadurai on race, identity, and globalisation. It also welcomes engagement with non-Western scholarship and cultural expressions that challenge Eurocentric epistemologies, offering comparative or transnational insights into the staging, scripting and spectacle of Islamophobia.
Contributors are encouraged to consider, among others, the following questions:
– How is Islamophobia enacted through visual, performative, and narrative forms in Europe?
– In what ways do state policies, legal discourses, and security regimes perform and legitimise exclusionary practices?
– How do artists, filmmakers, writers, and activists perform resistance and reclaim agency in spaces of representation?
– What does an anthropological reading of performativity reveal about the social and cultural reproduction of fear, suspicion and belonging?
By foregrounding the performative dimension of Islamophobia, this volume seeks to articulate, critique, and challenge the mechanisms through which bias becomes embodied and made visible, while amplifying the creative and intellectual interventions that seek to undo it.
Submission Guidelines:
Proposals: Please submit a title, a 150-200 word abstract, and a 150-word biographical note by 20 December 2025.
Full chapters: Accepted contributors will be invited to submit their full papers (6,000-8,000 words) by 30 May 2026.
Formatting: All submissions should follow the latest Harvard referencing style. Please send proposals and inquiries to the Editor, Kamal Salhi, performingislam@yahoo.com.
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Chargé de diffusion scientifique (2 décembre 2025). Call for papers | Journal Performing Islam Special Issue: “Performing Islamophobia” — LIMITE : 20/12/2025. IISMM. Consulté le 13 janvier 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/1599v
