Deadline Submission of proposals: June 30, 2020
Jews and Muslims in Europe: Between Discourse and Experience
Edited by Samuel Sami Everett (University of Cambridge) and Ben Gidey (Birkbeck, University of London)
The Jew and the Muslim are historically among the primary figures of alterity in Europe, the constitutive outsiders who have shaped what Europe is, notably around questions of conflict, migration and integration. However, on the ground contemporary Jewish and Muslim communities have often been at the forefront of critical engagement with these questions, for example with regard to the Mediterranean migration crisis and heightened societal security concerns.
Although the academic evidence indicates negative attitudes to Jews and to Muslims in Europe correlate with each other in wider society, in the current century public discourse has instead emphasized growing antagonism between them. Commentators have pointed to Muslims as perpetrators of antisemitism in France, Germany, and the UK; others have pointed to the growing alignment between organized Jewish community bodies and the rising populist tide. However, scholarship tends to concentrate on only one of these narratives, while ethnographic insight suggests that in urban neighbourhoods, relations are often complex but not necessarily conflictual.
This volume seeks to engage with meta-discourses of alterity and diversity and the complexity of everyday encounter and relation to add comparative perspective for the better understanding of historical and contemporary European discourses towards and the experiences of Jews and Muslims in Europe. To explore these questions we invite authors to contribute theoretical and historical perspectives and/or empirical analyses.
Listed below are a few additional areas authors might like to address:
- Attempts to retrieve earlier (real or imagined) periods of conviviality
- State and local state discourse and policy
- Day to day commercial exchange and banal street contact
- Cultural traffic within the music, museum, and arts scenes
- Media and community media
Please send proposals (400 words) and a brief bio to Dr Sami Everett (se365@cam.ac.uk)
Deadline Notification of acceptance: September 30, 2020
Deadline completed manuscripts (7,000 words): April 30, 2021