ISS 26 Facing Race White Australian Converts to Islam

The figure of 'the Muslim' is constructed by both Muslim and non-Muslim Australians as incongruent with whiteness, but what of white Muslim converts, who are at once highly racialised and racially invisible? Facing Race explores the lived experiences of thirty-six Australian converts to Islam, in a nation where Islam is cast in opposition to the dominant racial narrative of whiteness that informs the nation's core ideology. Drawing on in-depth interviews, author Oishee Alam provides a fascinating account of how racialisation is reproduced in everyday interpersonal encounters by white converts, with Muslims and non-Muslims alike - and what those experiences reveal to us about race, Islamophobia and whiteness in contemporary Australia.

Oishee Alam is a sociologist of race and ethnic studies. She works as a Research Fellow at Western Sydney University, where she completed her PhD in 2016. Her research and teaching areas include race and racism, whiteness, nationalism, Islamophobia and bystander anti-racism.