The Sounds of Silence and Sensationalism: Navigating the Mediation of Anti-Muslim Sentiment

• In Event: ICA Interactive Paper/Poster Session II
  In Interactive Poster Session: Ethnicity and Race in Communication Interactive Poster Session

Abstract

This paper investigates how people within a multicultural city conceptualise issues of significance to society through their understanding of mainstream news discourses amid their wider communicative practices, including face-to-face and mediated interactions. By drawing upon semi-structured interviews with diverse individuals in Australia, who are from a range of cultural and migratory backgrounds, this paper examines how participants construct racialised ‘Otherness’ and engage with difference. It draws upon the notion of political listening, paying attention to the anticipatory positions that open up the potential for mainstream media to transcend representational binaries that oscillate between silence and sensationalism. However, it also analyses the paradoxical forms of anti-Muslim sentiment that are simultaneously deployed by participants in their criticism of media. This paper concludes by considering how certain media outlets might better facilitate political listening, utilising the participants’ conceptualisations of key spaces for enhancing everyday mediated recognition.

Author

• Tanya Muscat, Macquarie U