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The Embodiment of Racialization: Running Muslim Women and the Sense of Non-Belonging

Project description

Understanding racial discrimination through running

What does recreational running have to do with racism? A Marie Skłodowska Curie Global Fellowship will research the connection. Specifically, the EmbRace project will answer this question. It will focus on recreational running as an angle to investigate the effects of racialisation on the relation to one’s own body, environment and other people. As an ethnographic study, it will explore the embodied and sensorial dimension of the racialisation of Muslims to reveal the embodiment of social hierarchies in social interactions among Muslim recreational athletes. The findings will shed light on the effects of racial discrimination in daily life. EmbRace will show how dispositions of non-belonging shape outdoor activities such as running and vice versa.

Objective

Muslims are the focus of political anxieties in Europe and the US. Over the last decade, numerous studies have documented the racialization of Muslims, and the impact of those discourses on those identified as such. Yet the embodied and sensorial dimension of the racialization of Muslims remains largely under-theorized. EmbRace posits that to better understand, and by extension tackle, the effects of (racial) discrimination in everyday life, we need not only to attend to statistics of reported racism or narrated accounts of racism, but also to the sensorial and bodily experience of it. This project takes recreational running as a fruitful angle to consider the embodiment of race. The leisurely activity of running enables an investigation of the effects of racialization on the relation to ones own body, environment, and to other people. The research design utilizes a multimodal ethnographic approach. To reveal the embodiment of social hierarchies in social interactions among Muslim recreational athletes, this project has two main objectives: 1) Conceptualize how dispositions of non-belonging shape outdoor activities such as running and vice versa, by analysing movement and narratives of movement (conceptual/empirical goal) and 2) To examine and theorize the processes through which the multisensory dimensions of racialization become embodied (theoretical goal). By proposing a knowledge transfer between the researcher, Leiden University (The Netherlands) and University of California, Berkeley (USA), this project aims to contribute to the theorization of embodied senses of non-belonging.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-GF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2021-PF-01

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Coordinator

UNIVERSITEIT LEIDEN
Net EU contribution
€ 199 014,24
Address
RAPENBURG 70
2311 EZ Leiden
Netherlands
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
No data

Partners (1)