The Embodiment of Racialization: Running Muslim Women and the Sense of Non-Belonging

Muslims are the focus of political anxieties in Europe and the US.

Over the last decade, numerous studies have documented the racialization of Muslims, and the impact of those discourses on those identified as such. Yet the embodied and sensorial dimension of the racialization of Muslims remains largely under-theorized.

EmbRace posits that to better understand, and by extension tackle, the effects of (racial) discrimination in everyday life, we need not only to attend to statistics of reported racism or narrated accounts of racism, but also to the sensorial and bodily experience of it. This project takes recreational running as a fruitful angle to consider the embodiment of race.

The leisurely activity of running enables an investigation of the effects of racialization on the relation to ones own body, environment, and to other people. The research design utilizes a multimodal ethnographic approach.

To reveal the embodiment of social hierarchies in social interactions among Muslim recreational athletes, this project has two main objectives: 1) Conceptualize how dispositions of non-belonging shape outdoor activities such as running and vice versa, by analysing movement and narratives of movement (conceptual/empirical goal) and 2) To examine and theorize the processes through which the multisensory dimensions of racialization become embodied (theoretical goal).

By proposing a knowledge transfer between the researcher, Leiden University (The Netherlands) and University of California, Berkeley (USA), this project aims to contribute to the theorization of embodied senses of non-belonging.