N Meer
Biographic Data
| ID | 19723 |
|---|---|
| NAME | N Meer |
| GIVEN NAMES | N |
| FAMILY NAME | Meer |
| SIGNATURE | MEER N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Glasgow |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3206-735X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 162 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Islam, Modernity, and the ‘Problem-Case’ of Religion
This article examines how social science has recurrently positioned Islam as a problem-case for European narratives of modernity, simultaneously comparable as ‘a religion’ yet cast as the religion that ‘doesn’t fit’ secularisation, differentiation, and liberal public-reason expectations. Moving beyond the view that social science merely misdescribed Islam, this article argues that Islam has often been made to carry an explanatory burden internal …
How crisis discourse shapes UK asylum governance
This article explores how discourses of crisis shape aspects of UK asylum governance. Bringing Teun A. van Dijk’s ‘ideological square’ into conversation with framing and political-communication literatures, it suggests that an evaluative pattern (foregrounding ‘our’ positives and ‘their’ negatives while backgrounding counterexamples) informs agenda-setting, legislative change, and some administrative routines. Drawing on interview accounts from r…
Social Policy and the Determinants of Vulnerability – Missing ‘Race’ in Climate Adaptation
This article stresses the need for climate adaptation to better grasp the social dynamics of vulnerability to climate change. It argues that prevailing approaches in the UK have been inattentive to the social determinants of vulnerability for ethnic and racial minorities. The article begins by setting out the ways in which adaptation is understood and interpolated across multiple levels in the policy process, before discussing why prevailing appr…
Revisiting the cruel optimism of racial justice – A response to Fadil, Favell and St Louis
The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice (2022) adopts neither an unswerving belief in the teleology of justice nor the pessimism that approaches to justice are necessarily incapable of grasping racism. It maintains instead that the accumulated struggle for racial justice invites us to recognise certain starting points, including our organising categories, before tracing seeming success and failure empirically through case studies. In their rigorous …
W.E.B. Du Bois and modern social theory
How might we move the current discussion of W.E.B Du Bois from a concern with omission to re-construction within modern social theory? Bhambra and Holmwood offer a novel means to do this through revisiting three texts: The Philadelphia Negro (1899), Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Black Reconstruction (1935). The following account explores the benefits of this approach, what it highlights for students and teachers, and discusses where other emphas…
Who still needs the nation? Empire, identity and the British welfare state
It is difficult to conceive of a re-imagination of "us" by focusing solely on the state, especially where the intended objective is to trouble the prevailing national project. If national projects, like racial projects, must be laboured at to be sustained, then in the case of Britishness we find a rich vein of contestation by those left out of its formal narration. It is on this point that the discussion will focus, beginning with a preliminary b…
Governing displaced migration in Europe
This article will explore the extent to which a focus on the 'local' can tell us something meaningful about recent developments in the governance of displaced migrants and refugees. Taking a multi-sited approach spanning cases in the south and north of Europe, we consider how the challenge of housing and accommodation in particular, a core sector of migrant reception and integration, can shed light on the ways local and city level approaches may …
Race Equality after Enoch Powell
Enoch Powell's infamous speech casts a long shadow over race equality in the UK . Looking back to the 1968 Race Relations Bill and then forwards to the present social and political landscape this article explores how an uneven race equality story has been characteristic of the UK approach since Powell's intervention. If the intended objective of the initial and later race equality bills was to reduce ethnic and racial disparities to a marginal or…
The ties that blind us - the hidden assumptions in the ‘new progressive’s dilemma’
Islamophobia and postcolonialism
In this article, Meer tentatively delineates three ways in which he understands that the concept of Islamophobia is being informed by postcolonial scholarship. The first functions as continuity, in so far as it is claimed that historical colonial dynamics are reproduced in contemporary postcolonial environments, broadly conceived. The second involves translation. This is related to the first but different in that it focuses in particular on the u…
Pointing the Finger, Islam and Muslims in the British Media Edited by Julian Petley and Robin Richardson
For “Jewish” Read “Muslim”? Islamophobia as a Form of Racialisation of Ethno-Religious Groups in Britain Today
I believe we can learn a lot from the history of the Jews of Europe. In many ways they are the first, the oldest Europeans. We, the new Europeans, are just starting to learn the complex art of living with multiple allegiances The Jews have been forced to master this art since antiquity. They were both Jewish and Italian, or Jewish and French, Jewish and Spanish, Jewish and Polish, Jewish and German. Proud of their ties with Jewish communities thr…
Refutations of racism in the ‘Muslim question’
Meer and Modood identify a variety of reasons why the notion that Muslim minorities could be subject to racism by virtue of their real or perceived ‘Muslimness’ is met with much less sympathy than the widely accepted notion that other religious minorities in Europe, particularly Jewish groups, can be the victims of racism. They begin by elaborating the relationships between Islamophobia, anti-Muslim sentiment and cultural racism, before turning t…
The politics of voluntary and involuntary identities
The denial that racism operates against Muslims qua Muslims has permeated public and media discourse of late. Intellectuals, commentators and legislators from across the political spectrum have explicitly rationalized this\nposition by distinguishing involuntary racial identities from voluntary religious identities. Meer explores the nature of Muslim identity vis-a`-vis the involuntary and\nvoluntary dichotomy before examining the consequences of…
Refutations of racism in the ‘Muslim question’
Meer and Modood identify a variety of reasons why the notion that Muslim minorities could be subject to racism by virtue of their real or perceived ‘Muslimness’ is met with much less sympathy than the widely accepted notion that other religious minorities in Europe, particularly Jewish groups, can be the victims of racism. They begin by elaborating the relationships between Islamophobia, anti-Muslim sentiment and cultural racism, before turning t…
The politics of voluntary and involuntary identities
The denial that racism operates against Muslims qua Muslims has permeated public and media discourse of late. Intellectuals, commentators and legislators from across the political spectrum have explicitly rationalized this\nposition by distinguishing involuntary racial identities from voluntary religious identities. Meer explores the nature of Muslim identity vis-a`-vis the involuntary and\nvoluntary dichotomy before examining the consequences of…
Islamophobia and postcolonialism
In this article, Meer tentatively delineates three ways in which he understands that the concept of Islamophobia is being informed by postcolonial scholarship. The first functions as continuity, in so far as it is claimed that historical colonial dynamics are reproduced in contemporary postcolonial environments, broadly conceived. The second involves translation. This is related to the first but different in that it focuses in particular on the u…
Governing displaced migration in Europe
This article will explore the extent to which a focus on the 'local' can tell us something meaningful about recent developments in the governance of displaced migrants and refugees. Taking a multi-sited approach spanning cases in the south and north of Europe, we consider how the challenge of housing and accommodation in particular, a core sector of migrant reception and integration, can shed light on the ways local and city level approaches may …
Who still needs the nation? Empire, identity and the British welfare state
It is difficult to conceive of a re-imagination of "us" by focusing solely on the state, especially where the intended objective is to trouble the prevailing national project. If national projects, like racial projects, must be laboured at to be sustained, then in the case of Britishness we find a rich vein of contestation by those left out of its formal narration. It is on this point that the discussion will focus, beginning with a preliminary b…
Revisiting the cruel optimism of racial justice – A response to Fadil, Favell and St Louis
The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice (2022) adopts neither an unswerving belief in the teleology of justice nor the pessimism that approaches to justice are necessarily incapable of grasping racism. It maintains instead that the accumulated struggle for racial justice invites us to recognise certain starting points, including our organising categories, before tracing seeming success and failure empirically through case studies. In their rigorous …
The politics of voluntary and involuntary identities
The denial that racism operates against Muslims qua Muslims has permeated public and media discourse of late. Intellectuals, commentators and legislators from across the political spectrum have explicitly rationalized this\nposition by distinguishing involuntary racial identities from voluntary religious identities. Meer explores the nature of Muslim identity vis-a`-vis the involuntary and\nvoluntary dichotomy before examining the consequences of…
Refutations of racism in the ‘Muslim question’
Meer and Modood identify a variety of reasons why the notion that Muslim minorities could be subject to racism by virtue of their real or perceived ‘Muslimness’ is met with much less sympathy than the widely accepted notion that other religious minorities in Europe, particularly Jewish groups, can be the victims of racism. They begin by elaborating the relationships between Islamophobia, anti-Muslim sentiment and cultural racism, before turning t…
For “Jewish” Read “Muslim”? Islamophobia as a Form of Racialisation of Ethno-Religious Groups in Britain Today
I believe we can learn a lot from the history of the Jews of Europe. In many ways they are the first, the oldest Europeans. We, the new Europeans, are just starting to learn the complex art of living with multiple allegiances The Jews have been forced to master this art since antiquity. They were both Jewish and Italian, or Jewish and French, Jewish and Spanish, Jewish and Polish, Jewish and German. Proud of their ties with Jewish communities thr…
Pointing the Finger, Islam and Muslims in the British Media Edited by Julian Petley and Robin Richardson
Islamophobia and postcolonialism
In this article, Meer tentatively delineates three ways in which he understands that the concept of Islamophobia is being informed by postcolonial scholarship. The first functions as continuity, in so far as it is claimed that historical colonial dynamics are reproduced in contemporary postcolonial environments, broadly conceived. The second involves translation. This is related to the first but different in that it focuses in particular on the u…
The ties that blind us - the hidden assumptions in the ‘new progressive’s dilemma’
Race Equality after Enoch Powell
Enoch Powell's infamous speech casts a long shadow over race equality in the UK . Looking back to the 1968 Race Relations Bill and then forwards to the present social and political landscape this article explores how an uneven race equality story has been characteristic of the UK approach since Powell's intervention. If the intended objective of the initial and later race equality bills was to reduce ethnic and racial disparities to a marginal or…
Governing displaced migration in Europe
This article will explore the extent to which a focus on the 'local' can tell us something meaningful about recent developments in the governance of displaced migrants and refugees. Taking a multi-sited approach spanning cases in the south and north of Europe, we consider how the challenge of housing and accommodation in particular, a core sector of migrant reception and integration, can shed light on the ways local and city level approaches may …
W.E.B. Du Bois and modern social theory
How might we move the current discussion of W.E.B Du Bois from a concern with omission to re-construction within modern social theory? Bhambra and Holmwood offer a novel means to do this through revisiting three texts: The Philadelphia Negro (1899), Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Black Reconstruction (1935). The following account explores the benefits of this approach, what it highlights for students and teachers, and discusses where other emphas…
Who still needs the nation? Empire, identity and the British welfare state
It is difficult to conceive of a re-imagination of "us" by focusing solely on the state, especially where the intended objective is to trouble the prevailing national project. If national projects, like racial projects, must be laboured at to be sustained, then in the case of Britishness we find a rich vein of contestation by those left out of its formal narration. It is on this point that the discussion will focus, beginning with a preliminary b…
Revisiting the cruel optimism of racial justice – A response to Fadil, Favell and St Louis
The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice (2022) adopts neither an unswerving belief in the teleology of justice nor the pessimism that approaches to justice are necessarily incapable of grasping racism. It maintains instead that the accumulated struggle for racial justice invites us to recognise certain starting points, including our organising categories, before tracing seeming success and failure empirically through case studies. In their rigorous …
Social Policy and the Determinants of Vulnerability – Missing ‘Race’ in Climate Adaptation
This article stresses the need for climate adaptation to better grasp the social dynamics of vulnerability to climate change. It argues that prevailing approaches in the UK have been inattentive to the social determinants of vulnerability for ethnic and racial minorities. The article begins by setting out the ways in which adaptation is understood and interpolated across multiple levels in the policy process, before discussing why prevailing appr…
Islam, Modernity, and the ‘Problem-Case’ of Religion
This article examines how social science has recurrently positioned Islam as a problem-case for European narratives of modernity, simultaneously comparable as ‘a religion’ yet cast as the religion that ‘doesn’t fit’ secularisation, differentiation, and liberal public-reason expectations. Moving beyond the view that social science merely misdescribed Islam, this article argues that Islam has often been made to carry an explanatory burden internal …
How crisis discourse shapes UK asylum governance
This article explores how discourses of crisis shape aspects of UK asylum governance. Bringing Teun A. van Dijk’s ‘ideological square’ into conversation with framing and political-communication literatures, it suggests that an evaluative pattern (foregrounding ‘our’ positives and ‘their’ negatives while backgrounding counterexamples) informs agenda-setting, legislative change, and some administrative routines. Drawing on interview accounts from r…
Sociology (11 works) · Political science (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Epistemology (4 works)