Muslim Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Western Sydney: Understanding the Role of Community-Specific Communication Infrastructure

ABSTRACT

In Australia, the COVID-19 pandemic rendered visible and exacerbated socio-economic inequalities and divides. Migrant and religious minority communities in Australia faced particular challenges during the pandemic when government responses were not made culturally accessible, appropriate or relatable. This paper examines the role played by community-specific communication infrastructures in addressing government deficiencies to meet the needs of Muslim communities. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Muslims in an area hit hard by the pandemic – Western Sydney – we consider the role communication infrastructures played in combatting misinformation, providing up-to-date information and creating spaces for locally and culturally informed responses to be developed. We propose that community-specific communication infrastructures were critical to Muslims seeking to address gaps, needs and inequalities during the pandemic and they were effective because they were designed with an understanding of Muslim communities’ social and cultural norms, practices, experiences and needs. The research offers insights relevant to migrant and religious communities, not-for-profits, and government agencies seeking to develop effective strategies to respond to challenges and crises as they emerge.

KEYWORDS:

• Communication infrastructure
• misinformation
• digital inclusion
• COVID-19
• Muslims
• Western Sydney

Introduction: The Pandemic, Social Exclusion and Inequality

In Australia, as elsewhere, migrant and religious minority communities faced particular challenges when government communication about COVID-19 was not made culturally accessible, appropriate or relatable. Multilingual crisis communication emerged as a critical issue in 2020, with people not fluent in English left struggling to find appropriate and up-to-date health information that was specific to their location (Mude et al. 2021). Besides linguistic limitations in governmental communication and services, a lack of clear and accessible information and a lack of standardised multilingual terminology also contributed to an information crisis (Piller et al. 2020). Investigations have illustrated that both Federal and state-level multilingual COVID-19 content at times contained erroneous, ‘nonsensical’ and even ‘laughable’ translation attempts in the messages distributed to multicultural communities (Dalzell 2020a). On the one hand, authorities were arguably heedless in handling these translation efforts, at times even relying on automated translation services such as Google Translate (Dalzell 2020b). Community representatives found these automated translated services unacceptable since they introduced risk, confusion and uncertainty that could contribute to the circulation of misinformation (Dalzell 2020b). On the other hand, to address this information void, translators, interpreters and community leaders had to step forward to undertake translation assignments and join the fight against the spread of COVID-specific misinformation. Their job was made challenging, however, since the pandemic brought ever more new phrases and terms that were simply not translatable. In many Global South languages, COVID-specific terms that have been created – such as ‘social distancing’, ‘pandemic leave payment’ and ‘travel bubbles’ – cannot simply be translated; new words and terms needed to be created or adopted for this, alongside explanations.

Beyond these issues, since the pandemic began, Australians have also been subject to targeted COVID-specific misinformation, much of it spread through digital platforms (Park et al. 2022). Misinformation—which we use in this paper as an umbrella term for all kinds of false and misleading information—is often compelling and persuasive and it can spread at speed and scale across digital platforms, particularly when knowledge gaps or information voids exist (Bruns et al. 2020; Gill and Rojas 2020). Misinformation that specifically targeted Muslim Australians during the COVID-19 pandemic primarily came in two forms: (1) misinformation that specifically circulated claims about Muslims and (2) misinformation that circulated claims about other groups but was distributed through Muslim media networks. One example of the first type emerged in August 2020, when an erroneous media report was published about a mosque opening during the lockdown in Auburn – a Western Sydney suburb (AMUST 2020). This caused rumours to spread on Facebook that asserted Muslims were not complying with the pandemic restrictions. An example of the second type, from September 2020, involved a controversial Australian Islamic speaker, Sufyaan Khalifa, who claimed on his YouTube channel that the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the 9/11 attacks, were ‘concocted’ in the same ‘laboratory’ of global Zionism and Freemasonry (MEMRI 2020). Both forms of misinformation demanded a socially and culturally relevant response to address associated risks.

The communication crisis that emerged around COVID-19 led migrant communities in the most culturally diverse area of Australia – the Western Sydney region – to invest time and effort to support their communities to address this challenge (Rachwani 2021). To explore what can be learnt from these efforts in terms of the use of communication to counter misinformation and address social and cultural exclusion during a crisis, this paper focuses on one migrant and religious minority group in Western Sydney – Muslims. First, we begin this article with an overview of how the pandemic aggravated social and political fractures between Western Sydney and other parts of Sydney. Second, we introduce the concepts of social and cultural infrastructure to make a case for their value as concepts that can guide and support analysis regarding the design and role of communication infrastructure. Third, we present our analysis based on an exploratory study of Muslim responses to the pandemic in Western Sydney. This analysis is then presented in two major sections that are built around key themes that emerged. In the first, we explore how Muslim cultural organisations and community groups responded to the crisis by developing their own culturally specific, responsive communication infrastructures. In the second section, we consider some of the culturally specific strategies, ethical frameworks and approaches that helped communities design their own communication infrastructures. We conclude the article by discussing what can be learnt from the community-specific communication infrastructures discussed in the paper. Overall, we find these communication infrastructures cultivated a feeling of togetherness and communities of care and, at the same time, offered a space for Muslims to come together to negotiate, create, promote, contest and challenge the meaning of events, claims and information.

Our study is part of a larger Australian research project, funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), Advancing digital inclusion in low income Australian families (2021-2024). Recognising the persistently low digital inclusion of people living in low-income households, this multi-sited three-year ethnographic research project seeks to explore the relationship between digital and social inclusion and to consider the role of social infrastructure in supporting the digital participation of low-income families. While this national project is primarily interested in examining the role played by charities, non-government organisations, community centres, libraries and educational facilities as social infrastructures, in this early exploratory research in Western Sydney we have sought to examine informal, ad-hoc, responsive and community-specific communication infrastructures that emerged to deal with the challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in a highly multi-cultural region.

While social infrastructure and cultural infrastructure are very much overlapping concepts, each term has a distinct focus. Through this preliminary study, and as part of the broader project we are part of, we have sought to analyse the respective value of these two concepts when it comes to addressing digital and social exclusion within migrant and culturally diverse groups and communities in Australia. As a conceptual lens, infrastructure focuses attention on the substrate of specific practices or communities of practice as well as the relations and interdependencies within it (Dourish and Bell 2007). Latham and Layton (2019) argue that infrastructures are not only ‘a crucial part of how cities function as socio-technological systems’ but also are ‘entangled with how socio-economic disparities are maintained and perpetuated’ (p. 2-3). In drawing on these related but distinct concepts in our exploratory study, we ultimately found great value in bringing the two concepts together. Paying close attention to the social and cultural dimensions of communication infrastructures in this study helped us to consider how social inclusion and exclusion were enacted, maintained and perpetuated during COVID-19 in Western Sydney. This analytical lens also supported us to consider how specific communities in this region used communication infrastructure to resist, challenge and counter disparities and inequalities.

Background: Muslims in Western Sydney

Western Sydney is the most culturally and ethnically diverse region of Australia (Collins 2000; Wali et al. 2018). As per the 2021 census, 43.2% of the population of Greater Sydney were born overseas (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2021). Some 3.2% of the Australian population identified as Muslims (approximately 813,392 people), while 40.5% of the total Muslim population of Australia reside in Greater Sydney (approximately 329,566 people) (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2021). Building on their analysis of the 2016 national census data, Dekker et al. (2019) found that there were five suburbs in Sydney where at least 25% of residents identified as Muslims – all of these suburbs are located in the Western Sydney area. Although an increasing number of Muslims in Sydney live in advantaged suburbs, most Australian Muslim residents live in socio-economically disadvantaged suburbs. All five of the Western Sydney suburbs with a Muslim population of more than 25% had a bachelor’s degree educational attainment level lower than the city-wide level, although two of these suburbs are very close to the national level (Dekker et al. 2019). Unemployment (measured by the number of people in the labour force who are not employed) in all five suburbs was higher than in Greater Sydney, while median household income was lower (Dekker et al. 2019). Overall, these data suggest that many Muslims in Western Sydney face socio-economic disadvantages.

While sustained waves of immigration, economic globalisation and multiculturalism have helped Muslims living in Western Sydney to attain a cosmopolitan identity, Muslims have been depicted through stereotypes and their identities and standing in Australia have been otherised and politicised. For instance, Muslims have often been constructed in Australian discourse as ‘pathologically violent, backward, anti-democratic, misogynistic and un-Australian’ (Randa 2017: 36). Several media studies indicate that race-related social commentary in Australian mainstream media negatively targets racial minorities, while Muslims are specifically and frequently targeted (Elias et al. 2021). A 2021 national survey by the Australian Human Rights Commission that was designed to investigate Australian Muslims’ concerns and experiences of hate, violence and negative public commentary found that almost 80% of the respondents experienced some form of unfavourable treatment based on their religion, race, or ethnicity (Australian Human Rights Commission 2021). In addition, a 2015 interview-based survey of 585 Muslims in Sydney found that more than half of the respondents (57%) had experienced racism at least sometimes (Dunn et al. 2015). However, the same study found that Muslims who live in Sydney are very supportive of cultural diversity, with 97% of the respondents agreeing that it is a good thing for a society to be made up of people from different cultures. Two-thirds of the respondents (66%) indicated that they frequently mix with non-Muslims in their social lives, challenging an assumption or stereotype that Muslims in Australia self-segregate (Dunn et al. 2015). The survey also found that civic participation among Muslims was higher than the Australian average, with 80% donating to charities, while one-third had volunteered for faith-based organisations or been involved in civil protests as a reflection of their involvement in society (Dunn et al. 2015).

Our study is positioned within this socio-cultural context and focused on a population group that is highly engaged in civic and community activities but is more likely to experience economic disadvantage, racism, racist media coverage and targeted misinformation. Our aim was to explore if and how these issues were addressed by Muslim groups, organisations and communities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Social and Cultural Infrastructure

The term infrastructure is often deployed as a conceptual lens in the social sciences to bring attention to ‘the background structures and systems that allow social, economic, cultural, and political life to happen’ (Latham and Layton 2019, p. 3). These structures are often (but not always) hidden because they are ‘infra’ or beneath the structure (Mar et al. forthcoming). Infrastructural relations ‘can both connect and divide people and places’ (Mar et al. forthcoming) because practice, culture and norms are ‘inscribed at the deepest levels of design’ in these infrastructures (Star, 1999, p. 389). Barney (2021) argues that scholars in media and communication have always been ‘infrastructuralists’ since work in this field has long included studies that examine how power, influence and control are enacted and imposed using communication infrastructures. This includes studies of railway networks, terrestrial telephone lines, submarine cables (the kinds of infrastructure that are at times referred to as ‘hard’ infrastructure) and – more recently – studies of software, platforms and algorithms (also referred to as ‘soft’ infrastructure).

Rather than singularly or primarily emphasising how national and global infrastructures are imposed, scholars that draw on the concept of social infrastructure are also often interested in examining alternative, multiple and less hierarchical infrastructures. Specifically, the concept of social infrastructure emphasises relationality: how do networks, spaces, facilities, institutions and groups create spaces for public use and what do these public spaces do for people and place? To understand the implications of infrastructure, Latham and Layton (2019) argue it is important to ‘consider the kinds and qualities of facilities that allow social life to happen, the kind of sociality that is afforded by them and how this can be recognised as a kind of public life’ (p. 4). This might include, they suggest, ‘the design and provision of novel and exhilarating spaces like swimming pools and climbing walls but also involve thinking about the social dimensions of functional spaces such as bike lanes and sidewalks’ (p. 4). By examining the affordances embedded within specific and diverse social infrastructures, researchers can examine how they facilitate interactions that support, create and maintain trust and whether, borrowing from urban sociologist Jacobs (1992), they promote everyday encounters that foster ‘an ethics of togetherness’. In this paper, we have drawn on this literature on social infrastructure to help us analyse the social dimensions of the communication infrastructures that were developed by Muslim communities in Western Sydney to respond to the COVID-19 crisis.

A focus on cultural infrastructure, however, has a different emphasis. While still interested in background systems and structures, rather than emphasising relationality, the lens of cultural infrastructure is instead focused on understanding how the ‘practical organization of space’ becomes ‘an infrastructure for the collective production and enactment of cultural meaning’ (Dourish and Bell 2007, p. 415). Motivated by the extending reach of digital media and technologies into everyday life, Dourish and Bell (2007) propose that the real value of an infrastructural lens is that it supports an examination of embodied action and encounters between people and technology. By focusing on different environments as cultural infrastructure, they suggest we can analyse how these infrastructure shape the way people experience the world or, as Ang (2021) puts it, examine ‘how meaning is made’ by, with, and for people. Dourish and Bell’s (2007) interest is in two aspects of infrastructure: the ‘infrastructure of experience’ and the ‘experience of infrastructure’. This dual focus matters, they argue, because these two things are recursive: ‘infrastructures give meaning to experience, and experience gives meaning to infrastructures’ (2007: 428). They argue that people creating technologies, therefore, need to understand the ‘complex interaction between space, infrastructure, culture, and experience’ and how technologies need to become embedded within and responsive to the environments that produce cultural meaning if they are to contribute in a useful and beneficial way (p. 429).

To date, much of the communication-focused research on social infrastructure has examined large-scale, global, dominant and/or stable substrates, ranging from global software (e.g. Rossiter 2016) to undersea cables (e.g. Starosielski 2015). Much of the literature on cultural infrastructure has focused on public cultural industries and institutions such as libraries and museums (e.g. Bennett and Joyce 2013; Mattern 2014). There are, however, some notable exceptions where scholars have focused on infrastructures that are designed for specific socio-cultural groups or have studied how they are used and experienced by specific socio-cultural groups. For instance, Blommaert (2014) considered the way the use of vernacular Dutch shop signs and communication between people ‘ties together the seemingly incoherent dynamics of the place, the apparently contradictory forces that operate on it and the absence of uniformity it displays’ (p. 446). In another example, Simone (2004) examined people as communication infrastructure in her study of economic collaboration among residents in Johannesburg, noting how marginalised, urban poor migrants were able to resist economic exclusion by making strategic decisions about engaging with individual actors who have ‘the capacity to circulate across and become familiar with a broad range of spatial, residential, economic, and transactional positions’ (p. 408). Simone’s conceptualisation shows that infrastructure can be transient, flexible, and contingent, in contrast to fixed or durable, as proposed by other scholars. These kinds of studies – which take specific people, cultural groups, places, or communities as their starting point – use infrastructure as a lens to study how sociality and cultural meaning are enacted, enabled and constrained for different people, groups and communities through infrastructures. In this study, we examine the social and cultural dimensions of community-specific communication infrastructure – which may comprise people, spaces, facilities, technologies, networks, groups and institutions – that were utilised to support Muslims in Western Sydney during the pandemic.

Research Design

This exploratory study was focused on learning from Muslim groups and organisations operating among migrant communities in the Western Sydney region. Our analysis is primarily based on a review of relevant news articles alongside six in-depth interviews carried out with Muslim civil society actors and community representatives in the Western Sydney region who worked for groups or organisations that were engaged in responding to the COVID-19 crises through community-level actions. These interviews took place during the first 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, which in Western Sydney included two lockdown periods. One of these lockdowns was still ongoing as we carried out our interviews during the period September to November 2021.

Prior to conducting these interviews, our study began with a review of media stories on Australian Muslim communities’ responses and actions in the region during the pandemic that had a communication dimension and were focused on addressing risk, inequality and exclusions. Using these news stories, we identified three related actions that demonstrated different ways Muslim communities were responding to COVID-19 using communication: (1) the promotion of community information intermediaries, who acted as a bridge between government agencies and Muslim communities, (2) an emphasis on Islamic ethical response messages as part of community-level actions and (3) the development of culturally-specific communication infrastructures to communicate risk in socially and culturally relevant ways.

Since this study was preliminary and exploratory, we were interested to hear from the representatives of Muslim community organisations to understand their experiences and responses to the COVID-19 crisis rather than hearing from any particular ethnic group within Western Sydney Muslim communities. The six community representatives interviewed were from a range of ethnic backgrounds, describing their own ethnic heritage as Turkish, South Asian, and Arab. There were both first-generation and second-generation migrant Muslims among the interviewees. We adopted a stratified sampling technique to ensure that the study included the opinions of Muslims with varied religious, cultural, linguistic, generational and professional identities. We identified participants using a two-stage process. In the first stage, we mapped major Muslim community organisations and associations located within the Western Sydney region. In the second phase, we contacted a shortlist of diverse Muslim community organisations to inform them about the study and invite them to participate in the study. In creating this shortlist, we sought to include a mix of formal and informal groups, both new and established organisations, with a range of different objectives and operation styles. We then conducted six online interviews using Zoom – a teleconferencing software programme. We used both semi-structured and open-ended questions to learn about the participants’ experiences during the pandemic, the various strategies and technologies they used to seek COVID-specific knowledge and updates, their assessment of the broader treatment and experience of Muslims during the pandemic and the partnerships and collaborations they initiated, or were part of, to address risk, inequality and exclusions. We then analysed the interview data using a thematic analysis approach. Thematic analysis is a data-driven process that categorises interview data into common themes. To ensure the confidentiality of participants, we have removed any identifiable personal and organisational details from this paper.

During the recruitment phase, our priority was to speak to representatives of Muslim community organisations and local Muslim spokespersons. However, during the interviews, we noticed that the participants were adopting and negotiating multiple cultural and professional identities. We could see categories of ethnicity, religion, language and national identities manifesting differently; often, these expressed identities were fluid (context-dependent) rather than fixed. In addition, we observed participants positioning themselves within a set of identities for validating their claims and stories. In other words, while we broadly identify this study as focused on exploring the experiences of Muslims in Western Sydney, it is essential to note that this was not a singular identity adopted by the participants. To explain our own identities in relation to religion, migration and Western Sydney, Jasbeer is a migrant Muslim researcher from India who has been living and working in the Western Sydney region for almost a decade; Tanya is a white, Anglo-Celtic non-religious Australian who was born and grew up in Western Sydney and has worked there as a researcher and university lecturer for the past decade.

Responding to a Health Crisis: The Role of Communication Infrastructure

When information gaps and voids emerge in a crisis, misinformation often flourishes (Gill and Rojas 2020). This proved to be the case in Australia, as with other parts of the world (Brennan et al. 2020). On occasion, misinformation about COVID-19 was targeted and spread specifically to Muslim communities in Australia. For instance, some Muslim-targeted misinformation was driven by suspicions or concerns about the authority of vaccine manufacturers and whether the contents are halal or not (Hussain 2020). To address this issue, Muslim networks collaborated with religious leaders and Muslim health professionals to refute false claims (Silva 2021). Then on February 13, 2021, the Australian Fatwa Council issued a fatwā stating the permissibility of vaccination (ANIC 2021). Other efforts also sought to address vaccine scepticism among Muslims. For instance, Muslim Health Professionals Australia – a national-level not-for-profit organisation – produced a new set of knowledge resources aimed at community education and caring for Muslim patients during the pandemic. In addition, Imams across the country used a range of communication methods such as Friday sermons and other religious forums and platforms to combat the spread of misinformation during COVID-19 (Rachwani 2021).

Digital Communication Infrastructures

Across the news stories we reviewed and our interviews, we identified that Muslim leaders and community organisations used digital communication infrastructures in culturally specific ways in the form of community-based online channels, instant group messaging and Zoom-based events. Our interviewees found WhatsApp to be the most convenient and popular platform among their respective communities for reaching out during the pandemic. Across our interviews, participants pointed to numerous ways that community-led WhatsApp groups acted as timely sources of information that were informed by and embedded within Muslim cultural dynamics. For instance, P4 noted that their organisation had many sub-committees and one of them focused on health. This committee, he explained, which was led by seven medical practitioners from the Muslim community, established a WhatsApp group to respond to unfolding events during the pandemic,

This group was dedicated exclusively to discussing the issues, concerns and questions related to COVID-19. So, we were communicating and receiving information from various channels, including government authorities and departments. We used this WhatsApp group to pass the official messages to our community members from time to time … We have been getting many queries [from the group members], some of them including verifying COVID-related misinformation. (P4)

This WhatsApp group, established by the organisation’s health committee, ensured that government and official health advice reached Muslim communities in a timely way. This was possible because of the health committee’s leadership team – comprised of seven doctors – who had expert knowledge as well as pre-existing relationships with other organisations, Muslim communities, government agencies and other experts. For P4, these WhatsApp group activities were extremely important because: ‘it helped us to inform official [COVID-specific] messages to our [community] members … also to network with other organisations to collect their expert knowledge [on COVID related topics] so that we can pass them [also] to our members’. This example demonstrates the value of supporting trusted local health experts to network and meet regularly since this will likely them to respond more effectively to emergencies and crises when they arise.

The research participants also provided examples that demonstrated that WhatsApp was adopted not only to connect the community with expert ‘insiders’ but also to establish peer-to-peer networking. A Muslim doctor we interviewed, who was active across several Muslim community organisations, indicated the importance of WhatsApp and other online networking tools for establishing timely peer support:

Recently I formed an association of medical graduates from my home state using WhatsApp. This is mainly for networking and sharing [medical] knowledge. There is a similar but larger group existing in the United States, also in the Middle East. So recently we thought of replicating that. And we started with a WhatsApp group, and it’s grown up quickly. We now have more than 150 members. Now, it’s only a low-profile WhatsApp group. But it might transform into something like an established organisation. (P1)

Community representatives, like P1, understood the role digital communication infrastructures developed with a sense of community spirit could play in facilitating migrant professionals’ informal learning and adaptation during the COVID-19 crisis when information and knowledge were evolving rapidly and physical mobility was restricted. Further, while healthcare professionals’ networks that were established based on Islamic identity may have been established as transient, responsive and temporary communication infrastructure, once created, they held the potential to grow, morph and develop over time. The broader value of these kinds of networks can be noticed, for instance, with the ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19) Vaccine Fatwa’ issued by the Australian Fatwa Council on February 13, 2021, since the Council indicated that they arrived at the decision to view the COVID vaccination as permissible only after consulting with ‘the trusted Muslim doctors and medical experts’ (Australian Fatwa Council 2021). Migrant professional communication infrastructure like this can therefore enable expert advisers to reach the communities quickly when an emergency or unexpected situation arises. This kind of infrastructure can also support rapid and appropriate content and knowledge curation and dissemination to support group members as well as other Muslim groups.

As our participants indicated, the community-led WhatsApp groups they created had the capability and flexibility to disseminate official messages and advice that were meaningful to Muslim communities because they were translated into local languages and localised with reference to cultural and social dynamics and protocols. The fact that WhatsApp does not require users to have high levels of digital skills or to create user profiles also meant it was more accessible than many other platforms.

Alongside WhatsApp groups, Zoom-based events and meetings were also regularly used to address the needs of Muslim communities during the pandemic. These Zoom meetings were often tailored to support both formal and informal bottom-up community initiatives.

We have been running many live sessions [on Zoom]. I was leading some of them. We had more than a hundred people attending the [live] talks. One of the upcoming events, for instance, is titled: ‘psychological impact of COVID among the community’. This [Zoom events] is almost an ongoing process for the last few months. (P1)

While Zoom became an essential communication infrastructure for many professional groups during the pandemic that enabled responsive communication, it was also adopted by Muslims to establish community-specific social networks. All participants indicated how experts within the Muslim communities came forward and helped to develop well-informed and appropriate responses during the COVID crisis. Doctors, for instance, from both public and private sectors, demonstrated preparedness to serve their communities by offering medical support and through knowledge production, dissemination and translation activities online.

We arranged special events using the Zoom platform. These events were very successful. We invited not only Muslims from our country of origin but also health professionals and experts from other communities. In one of these Zoom events, we had about ten doctors responding to the questions of our community members … this program was again broadcasted using our YouTube channel and Facebook. So huge connections through the online platforms were generated. (P4)

Participants also stressed that Muslim communities in the Western Sydney region, using digital communication platforms such as Zoom, were able to organise events that connected authorities, subject matter experts, support services and other actors, demonstrating their extensive infrastructural capacity. They also highlighted the need for religious organisations and community networks to be recognised as important resources for supporting wellbeing and togetherness, thereby helping to combat fear, uncertainty and anxiety during the crisis.

The Role of Religious Leaders and Mosques

The six interviewees spoke about the history of pandemics in the Muslim world documented in religious texts and the need to deploy this past knowledge to inform Muslims about how they can learn from the past to contain the spread of contagious diseases using prophetic teachings. One of the interviewees told us that relaying these historical experiences at different phases of the pandemic played a major role in informing and motivating Muslims to follow COVID regulations.

I think almost all the Imams … right from the beginning when the vaccines came out, they supported it. They came [forward] with rulings. Religious rulings. They also supported lockdown. We know one of the famous Prophetic sayings: ‘if you hear of an outbreak of plague in a land, do not enter it; but if the plague breaks out in a place while you are in it, do not leave that place’. It’s a well-known saying. For Muslims, a pandemic is not new. It is there in the book [religious scriptures]. (P1)

Several interviewees told us that Muslim religious leaders often focused on ethical and cultural responses to the pandemic to explain the need to close places of worship to comply with lockdowns, the permissibility of the vaccines and the importance of being vaccinated. Insights from the interviewees suggest that religious decrees, prophetic messages and timely communication from religious leaders provided a shared source of comfort and guidance for Muslims. Numerous Australian news reports also noted the key role played by Muslim religious leaders during different phases of the pandemic, including on their use of communication infrastructures for online live mosque prayer broadcasts, community information sessions and social media information campaigns (ABC 2021; Rachwani 2021; SBS 2021).

To our question of whether Islamic information and messages played a role in crisis management in the context of COVID-19, P2 explained:

Absolutely! We need verdicts. We need Islamic verdicts and applying Islamic principles to things that are new and emerging … I mean, looking at the Qur'ān and the Sunnah [prophetic teachings], there is a lot of evidence in our religion on the importance of seeking medical assistance and following the knowledge of scholars and following the knowledge of people who are experts in their fields. (P2)

Thus, Islamic verdicts were seen as a form of (soft) cultural infrastructure that allowed for the construction of meaning in new, uncertain circumstances and were critical to the design of communication infrastructure that served Muslim communities.

Some participants also highlighted how mosques in Western Sydney played an integral role during the pandemic. One participant told us that the mosque is far more than a place of worship; mosques can play a heterogeneous socio-cultural role because they already address the needs of believers. Therefore this makes them well equipped to function as communication infrastructure to address the needs of Muslim communities during emergencies or crises. On this topic, P5 explored the role of the mosque:

Well, in our culture, mosques were not seen just as a place of worship. It is also where other needs can be met. So, we have that philosophy at our mosque. We have a worship place at [the Mosque], but we have a youth Centre, a TV project and other related projects. For us, it is an essential fit. And there is a need in the community. And vaccination hub is one among them. So, yeah, there’s been not any question of whether it is inappropriate for a mosque or not. And at one stage, there was an expectation of some of our support from our community. (P5)

Mosques, we were told by the interviewees, could enable and facilitate ‘secure’ and trusted socio-cultural communication and civic practices and, in this way, provide some reassurance to worried and already marginalised communities. These civic practices include the provision of direct support – of vaccines and food, for example – in a time of need. These examples demonstrate that religious cultural infrastructures, like mosques, can play a crucial role in crises by responding to the needs and concerns of their own communities as well as by providing access to multi-functional spaces that already facilitate the everyday production of cultural narratives about belonging and becoming (Williamson 2020).

Overall, the Muslim participants we interviewed were very optimistic about the critical role of this communication infrastructure in mobilising Muslims to adopt COVID-safe choices and to act for the collective benefit of the Western Sydney region. This also demonstrates that Muslim cultural infrastructure can also act as a form of community-specific communication infrastructure during a health crisis. By circulating historical knowledge alongside motivational guidelines, mosques and religious leaders can play an irreplicable role in helping faith-based communities prepare for and respond to the situation individually and collectively.

Responding to Communication Infrastructure Failures

The COVID-19 crisis forced a much greater dependence on governments, magnifying – and at times problematising – interdependencies. In Western Sydney, at times, these interdependencies highlighted the asymmetrical and hierarchal nature of service delivery to diverse cultural groups and illustrated the risk or vulnerability of this model. As many scholars who use an infrastructure lens have pointed out (Mar et al. forthcoming), infrastructures are very often revealed at the point where they break down or fail. This was certainly the case in Western Sydney when culturally relevant and appropriate communication was not made available by government agencies when it was urgently needed. This communication failure highlighted how critical community-specific communication infrastructures are during a health crisis.

During the interviews, participants emphasised that many of their COVID-19 efforts were a response to needs that emerged because of a failure of government communication and services to meet the needs of Muslims. As noted, many Muslims living in Western Sydney are part of migrant communities and many are likely to reside in low income households. Several participants believed that the challenges their community faced were increased because of the lack of adequate attention from authorities. As to our question on whether their communities were targeted by any COVID-specific misinformation in the region, one participant responded:

I didn’t see misinformation, but I found a lack of information! I found the difficulty in navigating the system. Many asylum seekers were facing challenges in claiming the money that the government was giving them. And then some people fell into the crack. They were not getting any money. Basically, many people were working cash-in-hand. These people couldn’t show the government that they were working. So, they couldn’t claim the fund. They also couldn’t go to work because of the lockdown. I raised this every time I met with authorities. But yeah, the threat was not misinformation but a lack of information! (P6)

Another participant told us that suburbs in Western Sydney continue to be at a persistent digital disadvantage compared to their affluent beachside suburbs. They believed that residents of the Western Sydney region were less likely than others to take advantage of the information and communication technologies (ICTs) and related services, often because what is offered to them is inferior. They also perceived that Western Sydney residents experienced less favourable treatment from the service providers.

There were a lot of issues with telecom networks. We were not even able to contact them. During the times when we needed to have access to Telstra or Optus, they were not there. When I wanted to complain about the network, it was very hard to reach them. They say ‘because of COVID, they are understaffed’ etc. Had I been calling from elsewhere [other than Western Sydney], the treatment would have been different. (P1)

One interviewee believed that the COVID-19 pandemic exposed an underlying pandemic of neglect for the residents of Western Sydney while community organisations were forced to address the inadequacies of government support services and infrastructures. As P2 explained:

People from Western Sydney, not only Muslims but from all religious groups, were completely neglected. And so now the government is throwing money. Throwing money at the community organisations with initiatives or grants to try and make up for all the damage that has been done through it. Now we have to do damage control. Yeah, responsibility has now shifted to community organisations to do damage control. (P2)

Besides establishing a range of communication infrastructure to address the gaps and deficiencies that emerged, Muslim community organisations in Western Sydney were also actively involved in developing cross-cultural collaborations for effective COVID interventions. Participants observed an increase in food insecurity during the early phases of the pandemic. To respond to this crisis, some Muslim organisations deployed Islamic-influenced social funding strategies. P5 described one such initiative:

We produced Muslim Kindness Boxes – a charity project. We were able to distribute some essential items, especially for the senior citizens. So, each of these boxes had essential grocery items, like oil, peas, rice and some sort of essential items. We distributed, I think, about 500 boxes. (P5)

These projects, P5 explained, were influenced by an Islamic ethic of care and were initiated by religious organisations. Nevertheless, the initiative operated with a broader vision and the beneficiaries also included people in need that were outside of any particular community or religious group. When we examined these Muslim-focused charity initiatives operating in Western Sydney, we observed they were mainly conducted using the infrastructural affordances of digital platforms and online donation methods.

As the pandemic exacerbated inequalities, expanded the gap of income-related inequity and disproportionately deepened the burden on minority communities, the participants found it necessary to cultivate opportunities to connect and mobilise with one another, as P4 pointed out:

As of today, I see roughly about 16 organisations with whom we have established a strong partnership. These organisations have been working for their cultural communities, in different areas [within Greater Sydney], for different language groups, cultural groups etc. We have been communicating with these organisations regularly … and we have been checking regularly how each of our groups has been doing during this crisis. Exploring how we can help each other. (P4)

Such partnerships developed during crises to address short-term needs can sometimes result in long-term mutual empowerment. As such, these cross-cultural partnerships mentioned by P4 indicate how their faith motivated them to establish meaningful collaborations that embodied robust reciprocal relationships. Further, this example of collaboration suggests that communication infrastructures can serve a dual socio-cultural role by enabling cross-cultural civic and social actions that have broader public benefit, which then, in turn, can sustain these infrastructures by creating a sense of benefit, shared wellbeing and belonging (Grabowska and Szymanska-Matusiewicz 2022).

While the communication infrastructures the participants developed or were part of were often responses to the failure of government communication, they also often engaged and worked in partnership with government agencies. P1 described such partnership as follows:

Our organisation is a registered establishment. Therefore, everything that we circulate [about COVID-19] is government-approved content. We have been getting health messages and instructions from the government departments. From the NSW [New South Wales] Health Department and NSW Police. We then effectively pass this message to our community members. Sometimes we translate the messages. (P1)

Several participants noted that collaboration with government agencies was critical to the effective management of the pandemic as it unfolded. As P4 explains:

We were continuously in contact with the Multicultural NSW [the government agency responsible for implementing policy and legislative framework to support multicultural principles in the State of NSW]. They were conducting meetings. Very regularly. Weekly meetings. A number of times, the Premier [of New South Wales] also joined us in these meetings … They were communicating with us. We were also asking questions. We were also invited to the meetings organised by the Federal Minister. Both these bodies [NSW State and Australian Federal governments] were providing us with [COVID] information and we were disseminating them to our communities. (P4)

However, not all participants shared this view. A few of the interviewees strongly believed their views, experience and expertise were ignored and government authorities, at least during the initial stages of the pandemic, had failed to represent them.

They [government bodies] completely neglected the multicultural communities from the messaging from the beginning. And they only really started when the numbers [of COVID cases] in the multicultural community were shooting up incredibly fast. And as a reaction to that, they [government bodies] realised their mistake and decided that they needed to have more targeted messaging to people from micro backgrounds and people from religious groups. But yeah, unfortunately, we were neglected. Completely neglected. And it was a massive oversight … It just looks like a haphazard approach. (P2)

On the one hand, the observations by P2 highlight how Muslims experienced discrimination and differential treatment from authorities during COVID. Such discriminatory practices, according to P2, were not religious in nature but rather were similar to those experienced by other minority cultural groups living in the Western Sydney region. On the other hand, P2’s perspective also indicates that some community representatives felt authorities not only failed to deliver culturally sensitive information and approaches to address COVID-crisis management but perhaps even neglected to consider the need for these. Rather than implementing culturally appropriate approaches, the government bodies, according to P2, had chosen to simply translate information and content about health recommendations and guidelines without having it adapted for different cultural communities. P2 highlighted the significance of consulting diverse communities about their needs, existing information channels and culturally specific concerns before this translation takes place. In many cases, we found that the communication infrastructures developed informally by Muslims to respond to COVID-19, such as the WhatsApp groups and uses of zoom discussed earlier, offered ideal spaces through which meaning could be negotiated and messages and information could be developed, translated, tested and refined. This suggests that the value of these community-specific communication infrastructures need to be recognised by governments and other actors responsible for disaster, crisis and emergency preparedness and responses.

Conclusion

The experiences shared by our participants offer novel insights into the role and value of community-specific communication infrastructure during a health crisis. Through our interviews with six key Muslim stakeholders living in Western Sydney, most of whom worked for or supported multiple Muslim organisations or groups, we learnt how communication infrastructures were created, adapted and customised to address government failures in communication and service delivery to a multi-lingual, multi-cultural area of Sydney. As the pandemic exacerbated inequalities, expanded the gap of income-related inequity and disproportionately deepened the burden on minority communities, Muslim leaders, mosques and organisations found it necessary to use and cultivate community-specific communication infrastructures to support and connect Muslim communities. Importantly we can see that although these communication infrastructures were socially orientated and they did support collegiality, interconnection and togetherness, they also provided a space for Muslims to come together to negotiate, create and disseminate meaning during the pandemic in ways that were culturally specific. By allowing Muslims to contextualise what was happening in relation to historical and prophetic narratives, they were able to find trust, comfort and security and make informed decisions about the health measures being proposed, such as lockdowns and vaccinations. By considering how meaning was made and negotiated through these communication infrastructures, we have learnt about the importance of not only looking at how infrastructural responses can support sociality and provide opportunities for community care, but also how they can perform vital work in terms of developing shared understanding by providing spaces where culturally specific questions can be asked and culturally-informed discussions can be had.

This research also shows that the research participants understood the role of these communication infrastructures beyond a social and cultural purpose. That is, some of the participants articulated that the communication infrastructure developed during COVID-19 to respond to the needs of Muslims in Western Sydney, provided a place for Muslims to access critical and timely information and support during the COVID-19 pandemic while acting as a gateway to directly connect experts from culturally-informed taskforces, who could then become part of sophisticated and timely crisis management responses. Key attributes of the Muslim community-specific communication infrastructure that were described to us were: 1) they were founded on an understanding of specific social and cultural norms, practices, experiences and needs, 2) they were designed to support beneficial, timely and caring social interactions through socially and culturally appropriate communication, 3) they brought in specialised experts who were recognised and trusted experts on subjects, and 4) they created a trusted space where meaning could be negotiated and circulated, where culturally specific questions could be asked, and culturally-informed discussions could be had. These features, we propose, can be used to inform the design of future efforts to support and sustain communication infrastructure that seek to address specific cultural and linguistic communities, especially during a crisis.

Ethics Declarations

This study has been approved by the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). The Approval number is 2000000908.

Acknowledgements

This paper was supported by a grant provided by the Australian Research Council for the project, Advancing digital inclusion in low income Australian families (LP190100677). We would like to thank our colleagues, Distinguished Professor Ien Ang and Dr Phillip Mar, for providing feedback on our use of the term infrastructure. We would also like to acknowledge that our understanding of the concepts of social and cultural infrastructure were greatly enhanced by a literature review carried out by Dr Phillip Mar, Zelmarie Cantillon and Deborah Stevenson for the Cultural Infrastructure group at the Institute for Culture and Society.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [grant no ARC Linkage LP190100677].

Notes on contributors

Jasbeer Musthafa Mamalipurath

Dr Jasbeer Musthafa Mamalipurath is a researcher at the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS), Western Sydney. His research sits at the intersection of digital media, misinformation, social exclusion, and race/ethnicity. His current works explore the critical role of digital media on mis/disinformation and the complex relationship between digital and social inclusion. Jasbeer comes with over a decade of professional experience in media and communication and has significant experience in developing research impact strategies and conducting engaged research.

Tanya Notley

Tanya Notley is Associate Professor at Western Sydney University, where she is a member of the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS). She has 20 years of experience working in the areas of digital inclusion, human rights media, media literacy, and media justice in partnership with NGOs, government agencies, public institutions, and the United Nations. Tanya is the Deputy Chair of the Australian Media Literacy Alliance (AMLA), and she co-leads the Platform for Civic Media Literacy at the Institute for Culture and Society.