Media Representations of Racism and Spatial Mobility: Young Muslim (Un)belonging in a Post-Cronulla Riot Sutherland

ABSTRACT

Young Australian Muslims living in Sydney have been influenced by the Cronulla riot. Online surveys (n: 76) and interviews (n: 10) reveal the impact on their engagement with the Sutherland region around Cronulla, detectable a decade after this event. The exclusionary intent of the rioters and their sympathisers was a racist form of spatial management that had both specific and general aims. The Australian news media contribute to the ethnic purification that was originally intended by the Cronulla riots. This reduces mobility among an ‘ethnic other’ in accessing spaces that have been portrayed as ‘racist’ – or, in the case of young Muslims, ‘Islamophobic’. Findings demonstrate the ongoing consequences of a wide-scale racist attack, like the Cronulla riot, on urban citizenship. Representations of the Cronulla riot are a repertoire of learning for young Sydney Muslims that rehearse what has been conceptualised as pedagogies of (un)belonging by Noble and Poynting [(2010). White Lines: The Intercultural Politics of Everyday Movement in Social Spaces. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 31, 489–505]. We have extended the application of this concept to a specific space and point to the means by which constructions of unbelonging are reinforced and made material. Processes of repetition and accumulations identified by Butler and Essed highlight how this enduring pedagogy of spatial unbelonging is maintained by media representations of places as Islamophobic.

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• Islamophobia
• spatiality
• belonging
• urban studies
• urban citizenship
• whiteness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Rhonda Itaoui is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University.

Kevin Dunn is Dean and Professor in Human Geography/Urban Studies in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University.

Notes

1. For a detailed overview of social constructivist understandings of Islamophobia as a form of ‘new racism’, see Itaoui (2016), Dunn et al. (2007), Poynting and Noble (2004), and Poynting and Mason (2006).

2. Media articles analysed were published from December 1997 to December 2013 from the Sydney Morning Herald, the Daily Telegraph, the Australian, and the St George and Sutherland Shire Leader. Articles were searched for reference to key terms including ‘Sutherland Shire’, and ‘the shire’, ‘reputation’, ‘stereotype’, and ‘identity’ in the Sutherland Shire Leader.

3. ‘The Shire’ is a common short-hand term used to refer to the Sutherland Shire, a Local Government Area (LGA) in Southeast Sydney where the suburb of Cronulla is located.

4. ‘SD’ is used in the paper when referring to the semantic differential scale questions in the survey.