Doctoral Dissertation Research: Islamophobia and Civil Rights Advocacy Organizations

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SES-0802767Howard WinantErik LoveUniversity of California Santa BarbaraThis dissertation project is an in-depth study of Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian American civil rights advocacy work around the issue of Islamophobia in the United States. The research seeks to address four hypotheses. First, the impact of racialization will move organizational leadership to pursue coalition building among a wide range of affected groups. Second, divisions will remain apparent in the "rank-and-file" membership and constituency of advocacy organizations. Third, the development of the organizational field under investigation will largely reflect the development of other fields of ethnic and racialized civil rights advocacy organizations in the United States. And, finally, events, more than pressure from members and constituents, will be the primary causal factors in large-scale changes in the organizational field. Data are drawn from three locations--local-level organizations based in Los Angeles and New York, and national-level advocacy organizations based in Washington, DC. The project studies changes occurring over time, as well as shifts in organizational forms and strategies through a multi-methods approach. This includes a longitudinal, comprehensive database of founding dates, mission statements, and membership statistics encapsulating temporal changes in the field of local-level advocacy organizations in New York and Los Angeles; a content analysis of press releases, newsletters, pamphlets, and other documents produced by national-level advocacy organizations; and in-depth interviews of people currently working with these organizations. Broader Impacts: This project seeks to elucidate in social science scholarship the connections between the diverse yet often collectively racialized Muslim, Middle Eastern, and South Asian communities in the United States. In addition, the data collection will produce digital archives that can be made available to other scholars interested in the field of Muslim, Middle Eastern, and South Asian American advocacy. The project will develop knowledge that has the potential to impact contemporary policy debates. Finally, the results of the research may provide useful, practical information for the civil rights advocacy organizations in the study.