Scott Poynting
Biographic Data
| ID | 91021 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Scott Poynting |
| GIVEN NAMES | Scott |
| FAMILY NAME | Poynting |
| SIGNATURE | POYNTING S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Western Sydney University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 404 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Toxic Gender Essentialism
This is the introduction to a special section we co-edited
Shifts, Changes and Missed Opportunities? Reflection on the 2016 Special Issue Contemporary Far Right Racist Populism in Europe
In 2026, the racist far right is no longer on the rise but is itself an established political power formation in countries across the world: Donald Trump defeated the Democratic candidate, Kamala H
Book Symposium Dedicated to The Suspect
completing a Master's degree in International Relations in 2008, aimed to pursue doctoral study on political Islam and al-Qaeda.Reported to counterterrorism police in May of that year by non-academic staff at the University of Nottingham for possessing a copy of the Al-Qaeda Training Manual downloaded lawfully for this study, he ended up researching another form of terrorism: that of the UK security state directed against British Muslims in its c…
International Nets and National Links
Work on this special issue has spanned two years, bookended by two highly mediatized, violent, extreme right-wing attacks, perpetrated on opposite sides of the globe
C. Banham, Liberal Democracies and the Torture of their Citizens
Asylum seekers in the global context of xenophobia
In 2015 the global media fixated on the 'Syrian crisis' that became the 'refugee crisis' for Europe. This construction of crisis was Eurocentric, temporally narrow and presented as problem for European nation states. We view the 'problem' rather as the nationalism and racism of receiving countries with a resurgence of a discourse of ethno-nationalist European identity sharpened by the global financial crisis and neoliberal austerity. Despite disp…
Media, Crime and Racism
N. Hager and J. Stephenson, Hit and Run
Islamophobia in Australia
In Australia since about the turn of the millennium, discrimination against Muslims has been increasingly normalized, made respectable, and presented as prudent precaution against violent extremism. Vilification of Muslims has posed as defending 'Australian values' against those who will not integrate. Liberal political leaders and press leader-writers who formerly espoused cultural pluralism now routinely hold up as inimical the Muslim folk devi…
Is racism an environmental threat
We’re Not Multicultural, but
This article reconsiders the 2005 Cronulla riots after ten years. We begin by examining three examples of events misread ten years ago, to illustrate some key changes that have since shaped Australian racism. The first two, concern the rallying call to ‘Leb and wog bashing day’ at Cronulla in December 2005, and the attack there on two Bangladeshi students. These are shown to be indicative in a shift in the focus of racist Othering in Australia, f…
Muslim and Dangerous
Global Islamophobia
Entitled to be a Radical? Counter-Terrorism and Travesty of Human Rights in the Case of Babar Ahmad
This article asserts that the construction of the prevailing notion of “radicalisation” in pursuit of counter-terrorism under US-led hegemony sustains practices of “empire crime” that systematically undercut the rights of Muslim populations in countries such as the UK and the US. This argument is advanced through the case study of Babar Ahmad, who was detained without trial for eight years in the UK, before being sent, under a new and lopsided ex…
Contemporary Far-Right Racist Populism in Europe
A spectre is haunting Europe. Not for the first time, right-wing racist movements are on the march across that continent, with parliamentary beachheads in a number of nations, as well, of course, a
Battle for the Flag
The riots in Sydney’s suburban, beachside Cronulla in December 2005 were practically unprecedented, and they shocked many Australians. They have not been repeated, despite dire warnings of pundits
Empire Crime, Rendition and Guantánamo Bay
This article argues that a concept of “empire crime” can usefully extend that of state crime to better comprehend the unlawful “extraordinary rendition”, detention without trial and torture associated with the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay and other sites where imperial “exceptions” to US and international law are claimed and practiced. Other nation states have been complicit in this regime — the UK, Canada and Australia among them. Their state…
Render unto Caesar
The crises of multiculturalism
Ali Abdul v The King
Global Islamophobia
The decade since 9/11 has seen a decline in liberal tolerance in the West as Muslims have endured increasing levels of repression. This book presents a series of case studies from Western Europe, Australia and North America demonstrating the transnational character of Islamophobia. The authors explore contemporary intercultural conflicts using the concept of moral panic, revitalised for the era of globalisation. Exploring various sites of conflic…
Counter-Terrorism and State Political Violence
This edited volume aims to deepen our understanding of state power through a series of case studies of political violence arising from state ‘counter-terrorism’ strategies. The book examines how state counter-terrorism strategies are invariably underpinned by terror, in the form of state political violence. It seeks to answer three key questions: To what extent can counter-terror strategies be read as a form of state terror? How fundamental is st…
Contemporary state terrorism
This volume aims to 'bring the state back into terrorism studies' and fill the notable gap that currently exists in our understanding of the ways in which states employ terrorism as a political strategy of internal governance or foreign policy. Within this broader context, the volume has a number of specific aims. First, it aims to make the argument that state terrorism is a valid and analytically useful concept which can do much to illuminate ou…
White Lines
This article draws on research into racist vilification experienced by young Arab and Muslim Australians especially since 11 September 2001, to explore the links between public space, movement and national belonging, and the spatial regulation of cultural difference that functions in Australia. The authors analyse the way that the capacity to experience forms of national belonging and cultural citizenship is shaped by inclusion within or exclusio…
Contemporary State Terrorism
The resistible rise of Islamophobia
This article compares the rise of anti-Muslim racism in Britain and Australia, from 1989 to 2001, as a foundation for assessing the extent to which the upsurge of Islamophobia after 11 September was a development of existing patterns of racism in these two countries. The respective histories of immigration and settlement by Muslim populations are outlined, along with the relevant immigration and 'ethnic affairs' policies and the resulting demogra…
Introduction - Negotiating Belonging
“Belonging” may well be one of the “softer” social science concepts but it is central to any discussion of some of the hardest issues facing human societies today: immigrant integration and cultura
Tolerance, Freedom, Justice and Peace
Since 11 September 2001, Muslim minorities have experienced intensive “othering” in “Western” countries, above all in those US-led anglophone nations which invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to prosecute their “war on terror”. This paper examines the cases of Britain and Australia, where whole communities of Muslims have been criminalised as “evil” and a “fifth column” enemy within by media, politicians, the security services and the criminal justice s…
What caused the Cronulla riot
The outbreak of mass racist violence against young men of 'Middle Eastern appearance' on Cronulla beach, Sydney, in December 2005 was the culmination of a campaign of populist incitement waged in the media and by the state. The battle to reclaim control of the beach for white Australia mirrored, it is suggested here, the battle that the Howard government has waged to reclaim control of the nation itself from asylum seekers and the Muslim/Middle E…
White Lines
This article draws on research into racist vilification experienced by young Arab and Muslim Australians especially since 11 September 2001, to explore the links between public space, movement and national belonging, and the spatial regulation of cultural difference that functions in Australia. The authors analyse the way that the capacity to experience forms of national belonging and cultural citizenship is shaped by inclusion within or exclusio…
Islamophobia in Australia
In Australia since about the turn of the millennium, discrimination against Muslims has been increasingly normalized, made respectable, and presented as prudent precaution against violent extremism. Vilification of Muslims has posed as defending 'Australian values' against those who will not integrate. Liberal political leaders and press leader-writers who formerly espoused cultural pluralism now routinely hold up as inimical the Muslim folk devi…
The New Integrationism, the State and Islamophobia
Contemporary Far-Right Racist Populism in Europe
A spectre is haunting Europe. Not for the first time, right-wing racist movements are on the march across that continent, with parliamentary beachheads in a number of nations, as well, of course, a
Global Islamophobia
The decade since 9/11 has seen a decline in liberal tolerance in the West as Muslims have endured increasing levels of repression. This book presents a series of case studies from Western Europe, Australia and North America demonstrating the transnational character of Islamophobia. The authors explore contemporary intercultural conflicts using the concept of moral panic, revitalised for the era of globalisation. Exploring various sites of conflic…
Grafting Cultures
This paper explores migration stories and examines the ways migrants use their gardens as sites of cultural practice in the Fairfield municipality of Western Sydney, one of the most ethnically diverse regions in Australia. We argue that many of those from diverse cultural backgrounds use their gardens in ways very different from the stereotypical conceptions of Australian suburbia. Far from being idyllic places of retreat and repose separate from…
Snakes and Leaders
Recent events in a ruling-class boys' boarding school college in Sydney prompted public discussion about 'bullying.' Debate ranged between those seeing an endemic problemto be cured and those who saw minor, unfortunate, and atypical incidents in a system where bullying is under control. It is argued here that such practice is inherent in ruling-class boys' education. It is an important part of making ruling-class men. Using life-history methods w…
Dog-Whistle' Journalism and Muslim Australians since 2001
Dog-whistle politics' was much discussed around the 2001 federal election campaign in which the Howard government used the ' Tampa crisis' and September 11 to appeal successfully to popular xenophobia and insecurities. The notion involves sending a sharp message which, like a dog whistle inaudible to humans, calls clearly to those intended, and goes unheard by others. This article argues that this sort of ideological manoeuvre has been abetted by…
The 'Lost' Girls
In an era of heightened concern about the second generation of Muslim immigrants in connection with 'home-grown terrorism' and supposed refusal to 'integrate', this paper interrogates the common sense that the second generation is 'lost' between cultures. Informed by in-depth, open-ended, semi-structured interviews with young second-generation Lebanese-background immigrants, this paper presents empirical material from two cohorts of participants,…
Intersections’ of Masculinity and Ethnicity
This article reports on an ethnographic study of teenage male secondary school students of Arabic‐speaking background in a working‐class suburb of Sydney. Interviews with friendship groups of migrant young men explored their identity formation in terms of ethnicity and masculinity. Their ‘intersections’ of masculinity and ethnicity, along with class relations, exhibit ‘contradictory consciousness’ characteristic of the ‘common sense’ of the socia…
The rise and falter of the field of ethnic politics in Australia
Since the advent of multiculturalism in Australia in the 1970s, ‘ethnicity’ has acquired not only cultural and social importance, but significant political consequences as groups mobilised around ‘ethnic communities’ and as the State increasingly structured social policy around cultural differences. The political patronage and funding central to Australian multiculturalism led to the development of organisations and leaders whose task was not onl…
We’re Not Multicultural, but
This article reconsiders the 2005 Cronulla riots after ten years. We begin by examining three examples of events misread ten years ago, to illustrate some key changes that have since shaped Australian racism. The first two, concern the rallying call to ‘Leb and wog bashing day’ at Cronulla in December 2005, and the attack there on two Bangladeshi students. These are shown to be indicative in a shift in the focus of racist Othering in Australia, f…
Asylum seekers in the global context of xenophobia
In 2015 the global media fixated on the 'Syrian crisis' that became the 'refugee crisis' for Europe. This construction of crisis was Eurocentric, temporally narrow and presented as problem for European nation states. We view the 'problem' rather as the nationalism and racism of receiving countries with a resurgence of a discourse of ethno-nationalist European identity sharpened by the global financial crisis and neoliberal austerity. Despite disp…
Acts of War
The media representations of the terrorist attacks of September 11 in the United States and their aftermath bear strong similarities to the media coverage of 'Lebanese youth gangs' over the last few years - both rely significantly on the metaphor of war. This paper explores two media narratives about Lebanese youth gangs which draw on this metaphor - the first deploys a simple us/them structure which, like the dominant Western reportage of the te…
Book Symposium Dedicated to The Suspect
completing a Master's degree in International Relations in 2008, aimed to pursue doctoral study on political Islam and al-Qaeda.Reported to counterterrorism police in May of that year by non-academic staff at the University of Nottingham for possessing a copy of the Al-Qaeda Training Manual downloaded lawfully for this study, he ended up researching another form of terrorism: that of the UK security state directed against British Muslims in its c…
International Nets and National Links
Work on this special issue has spanned two years, bookended by two highly mediatized, violent, extreme right-wing attacks, perpetrated on opposite sides of the globe
Entitled to be a Radical? Counter-Terrorism and Travesty of Human Rights in the Case of Babar Ahmad
This article asserts that the construction of the prevailing notion of “radicalisation” in pursuit of counter-terrorism under US-led hegemony sustains practices of “empire crime” that systematically undercut the rights of Muslim populations in countries such as the UK and the US. This argument is advanced through the case study of Babar Ahmad, who was detained without trial for eight years in the UK, before being sent, under a new and lopsided ex…
The Bang’ and SNAP
Over the last few years there has been a series of ‘moral panics’ over the introduction of Peace Studies into educational institutions. This case study examines the recent public controversy over an educational play call The Bang presented in secondary schools in New South Wales, and the associated attacks on student interest groups called Students for Nuclear Awareness and Peace (SNAP). The case study raises questions about power relations in th…
A New Tradition or a Continuity in the Australian Peace Movement? Reply to Saunders and Summy
The Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship, March 1952
There is a tendency in writing on the Australian peace movement to assume that widespread participation of youth in that movement began with the Vietnam War.1 It is true that the Anti-Vietnam War, Anti-Conscription Movement marked the peace movement's first mobilisation of middle-class youth on a mass scale in Australia.2 Nevertheless, working-class and radical young people had been vitally involved in the anti-war movement in earlier periods, in…
Watson, Ian, Fighting Over the Forests
Weird Science' and 'Common Sense
(1998). ’Weird Science’ and ‘Common Sense’: the discursive construction of accelerative learning. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education: Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 141-156
When ‘Zero Tolerance’ Looks Like Racial Intolerance
Intersections’ of Masculinity and Ethnicity
This article reports on an ethnographic study of teenage male secondary school students of Arabic‐speaking background in a working‐class suburb of Sydney. Interviews with friendship groups of migrant young men explored their identity formation in terms of ethnicity and masculinity. Their ‘intersections’ of masculinity and ethnicity, along with class relations, exhibit ‘contradictory consciousness’ characteristic of the ‘common sense’ of the socia…
Accounting for Cultural Diversity
Appearances and ‘Ethnic Crime’
(2001). Appearances and ‘Ethnic Crime’. Current Issues in Criminal Justice: Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 110-113
Bin Laden in the Suburbs’
Racism and Community Safety
(2002). Racism and Community Safety. Current Issues in Criminal Justice: Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 328-332
Anti-Discrimination Board of NSW (2003) Race for the Headlines
Anti-Discrimination Board of NSW (2003) Race for the Headlines: Racism and media discourse, Sydney, ISBN 0646422016
Acts of War
The media representations of the terrorist attacks of September 11 in the United States and their aftermath bear strong similarities to the media coverage of 'Lebanese youth gangs' over the last few years - both rely significantly on the metaphor of war. This paper explores two media narratives about Lebanese youth gangs which draw on this metaphor - the first deploys a simple us/them structure which, like the dominant Western reportage of the te…
Dog-Whistle' Journalism and Muslim Australians since 2001
Dog-whistle politics' was much discussed around the 2001 federal election campaign in which the Howard government used the ' Tampa crisis' and September 11 to appeal successfully to popular xenophobia and insecurities. The notion involves sending a sharp message which, like a dog whistle inaudible to humans, calls clearly to those intended, and goes unheard by others. This article argues that this sort of ideological manoeuvre has been abetted by…
The rise and falter of the field of ethnic politics in Australia
Since the advent of multiculturalism in Australia in the 1970s, ‘ethnicity’ has acquired not only cultural and social importance, but significant political consequences as groups mobilised around ‘ethnic communities’ and as the State increasingly structured social policy around cultural differences. The political patronage and funding central to Australian multiculturalism led to the development of organisations and leaders whose task was not onl…
Grafting Cultures
This paper explores migration stories and examines the ways migrants use their gardens as sites of cultural practice in the Fairfield municipality of Western Sydney, one of the most ethnically diverse regions in Australia. We argue that many of those from diverse cultural backgrounds use their gardens in ways very different from the stereotypical conceptions of Australian suburbia. Far from being idyllic places of retreat and repose separate from…
Snakes and Leaders
Recent events in a ruling-class boys' boarding school college in Sydney prompted public discussion about 'bullying.' Debate ranged between those seeing an endemic problemto be cured and those who saw minor, unfortunate, and atypical incidents in a system where bullying is under control. It is argued here that such practice is inherent in ruling-class boys' education. It is an important part of making ruling-class men. Using life-history methods w…
Rough Music
Publisher's details for: Rough Music: Blair/Bombs/Baghdad/London/Terror, By Ali, Tariq (2005), Verso, London and New York, ISBN 1844675459
Tolerance, Freedom, Justice and Peace
Since 11 September 2001, Muslim minorities have experienced intensive “othering” in “Western” countries, above all in those US-led anglophone nations which invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to prosecute their “war on terror”. This paper examines the cases of Britain and Australia, where whole communities of Muslims have been criminalised as “evil” and a “fifth column” enemy within by media, politicians, the security services and the criminal justice s…
What caused the Cronulla riot
The outbreak of mass racist violence against young men of 'Middle Eastern appearance' on Cronulla beach, Sydney, in December 2005 was the culmination of a campaign of populist incitement waged in the media and by the state. The battle to reclaim control of the beach for white Australia mirrored, it is suggested here, the battle that the Howard government has waged to reclaim control of the nation itself from asylum seekers and the Muslim/Middle E…
Climates of Hate
This article represents a preliminary comparative exploration of anti-Muslim racism and violence in Australia and Canada, especially since September 11. The article contextualises the anti-Muslim vilification and victimisation within parallel—yet still distinct—political climates that bestow permission to hate. That is, negative media portrayals, together with discriminatory rhetoric, policy and practices at the level of the state create an enabl…
Introduction - Negotiating Belonging
“Belonging” may well be one of the “softer” social science concepts but it is central to any discussion of some of the hardest issues facing human societies today: immigrant integration and cultura
The resistible rise of Islamophobia
This article compares the rise of anti-Muslim racism in Britain and Australia, from 1989 to 2001, as a foundation for assessing the extent to which the upsurge of Islamophobia after 11 September was a development of existing patterns of racism in these two countries. The respective histories of immigration and settlement by Muslim populations are outlined, along with the relevant immigration and 'ethnic affairs' policies and the resulting demogra…
The New Integrationism, the State and Islamophobia
Contemporary State Terrorism
Political science (41 works) · Sociology (38 works) · Law (33 works) · Politics (20 works) · Criminology (19 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (13 works) · History (12 works) · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence (12 works)