Approaching the Emotional World: An Exploration of the Lived Experiences of Ismaili Muslim Youth

• In Event: 31.024 - "Dear Darling, Stiiir It Up!" Youth Reprogramming the World Beyond General Education and Family Separations

Abstract

This paper seeks to share a psychosocial approach to studying the identity and emotional life of Shia Ismaili Muslim adolescents, in order to provide a complex portrait of the intersections of culture, faith, and citizenship. The study aims to represent some of the voices of Canadian Muslim youth, and is in response to an increase of Islamophobia in the Western world, which often flattens out Muslim identity as one-dimensional, dominated by the marker of religion. In an attempt to help grant subjective complexity to the subject more often associated with hostility within the political sphere, a psychoanalytic lens is used in this study to help offer an anti-racist, and anti-essentialist discourse to the study of Muslim identity.

Author

• Farah Virani-Murji, York University