Blog post by Wajihah Hamid, Macquarie University, Australia
 
Every year, Eid al-Adha is often introduced to the wider public as the Muslim ‘festival of sacrifice’. This description is not wrong, but it is too thin. It tells us what the day commemorates, but not what the day does: how it gathers families, moves food across households, renews bonds of obligation, and makes Islam visible not as an abstraction, but as a lived and ordinary practice.

Eid al-Adha marks the story of Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham), his family, and their willingness to submit to God. It is closely tied to Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Makkah, and to the memory of sacrifice, trust and obedience. For Muslims who are able to do so, Eid al-Adha is also marked by qurban or udhiyah, the ritual sacrifice of an animal. The meat is then distributed among family, neighbours and those in need. The Qur’an (22:37) teaches that it is not the meat or blood that reaches God, but piety and sincerity. This matters because qurban is not simply an act of ritual slaughter. It is an ethical practice of sharing.

On Eid morning, millions of Muslims around the world attend congregational prayers at local mosques, open fields, community halls and temporary prayer spaces. The morning is filled with takbir, greetings, embraces, visits to elders, gifts for children, food prepared in advance, and messages sent across families separated by migration and distance. The day before Eid, the Day of Arafah, is also widely understood by Muslims as a special time for supplication and nearness to God. A well-known hadith describes the best supplication as the supplication of the Day of Arafah. Eid al-Adha therefore sits within a larger sacred time: prayer, remembrance, charity, food and community.

Blog post by Jihane Sliti and Iman Lechkar, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

With the rapidly deteriorating security situation in North East Syria, media discourse once again presents the issue of Kurdish-led camps and its prisoners as a security threat. As the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) lose control over detention camps, such as Al Hol, reports of mass escapes of Islamic State members dominate the news. In Belgium, this renewed sense of urgency was reinforced when Minister of Foreign Affairs Michel Prevot stated on 22 January 2026 that ‘terrorist fighters will not be able to return to Belgium’.

Fear-driven discourses are not new. For more than a decade, public and political debates on Belgian men who travelled to Syria have largely been shaped by punitive logics and vindictiveness. Yet our research shows that ‘foreign fighters’ have not always been framed as irredeemable threats. Media discourse has, at times, allowed for complexity and empathy, though not for everyone.

Based on a critical media discourse analysis, our research published in our Identities article, ‘On altar boys and good-hearted guys: de-Othering and the whitening of male convert “foreign fighters” in Belgian newspapers’, shows that the category of ‘foreign fighters’ was not always associated with danger. While born Muslim Belgian men who left for Syria were frequently depicted as barbaric and irredeemable, converts were mostly presented as naïve and disillusioned individuals who had made poor choices. Indeed, scholarly literature discerns two main depictions of convert men as naïve, disillusioned and redeemable, or as traitors, radical and in high-ranking positions. 

Blog post by Amani Braa, University of Montréal, Canada

What do hundreds of people from across the world, conversations unfolding in over a dozen languages, and an unusually bright sun over Leeds have in common?

At first glance, perhaps nothing.

And yet, for a few days in April, they all converged in one place: the Race and Media Conference.

There was something quietly striking about that sun. Throughout the week, people kept mentioning it – half amused, half surprised – ‘This doesn’t happen very often in Leeds’. It became a recurring joke, a shared observation, almost a ritual of disbelief. And yet, it lingered. As if the city itself had decided, for once, to lean into the moment. As if Leeds was offering a kind of warmth that mirrored the intensity, generosity and urgency of the conversations taking place within its walls.

Blog post by Nadine Thielemann and Lejla Atagan, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria
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Public debates about migration often allege economic burden, stress cultural differences or question integration. What tends to be overlooked are the everyday strategies through which migrants create stability, dignity, and a sense of belonging in their new environments. One place where these strategies become visible is in small businesses – especially in gastronomy, a sector where many migrants find opportunities despite structural barriers to the labour market. But what does it actually mean to become an ‘entrepreneur’ when one’s life has been shaped by migration? And how do migrants make sense of this transition in their own words?

Our Identities article, ‘Empowerment through enterprise: Balkan migrants and the narrative of entrepreneurial identity’, explores these questions through the lens of narrative identity. We conducted qualitative interviews with migrant entrepreneurs from the Balkan region who run gastronomy businesses in Vienna. Rather than evaluating their businesses, we examined how they narrate their identities, how they came to their current positions and what entrepreneurship means to them in their lives.

Across the interviews, a distinctive narrative pattern emerged. Migrants weave together two storylines often treated as separate: classical entrepreneurial themes of self-reliance, hard work and autonomy, and migrant experiences of vulnerability, marginalization and the search for recognition. When intertwined, they create a unique variation of the entrepreneurial ‘success story’, shaped by the realities of migration.