'Gaza in Oslo': Social imaginaries in the political engagement of Norwegian minority youth

Excerpt from abstract:

In the winter of 2008/09 thousands of people took to the streets of Oslo to demonstrateagainst the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Young people of visible minority and Muslimbackground were central actors in these demonstrations. The public expression ofMuslim identities and symbols during the demonstrations along with clashes betweensome of the young demonstrators and the police fuelled the already polarized debateconcerning the integration of immigrant youth and Islamic radicalism existing in theNorwegian public realm. Using data gathered through ethnographic fieldwork and webethnographywe follow the engagement of youth from a multi-ethnic Oslo mosque bothonline and offline. In critical dialogue with perspectives on political contention andtransnational political activism, we analyse this transnational mobilization in terms ofthe ‘social imaginaries’ that mediated engagement with the Gaza question: ‘the globalMuslim imaginary’, ‘secular leftist internationalism’ and ‘integration nations’.

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