Blog post by Tahseen Shams, University of Pennsylvania, USA

​In my research, I ask how do Black and White Canadians perceive South Asian Muslims – the largest Muslim ethnic group in Canada – as romantic partners? Based on interviews of 46 Black and White Canadians from diverse socioeconomic background in Toronto, my Identities article, ‘Religification of brownness and racialization of Muslimness: how do Black and White Canadians perceive South Asian Muslims as romantic partners?’, shows that Islamophobic tropes as civilizationally backward, patriarchal and intolerant of religious freedom and sexual minorities deter many Black and White Canadians who are not Muslim to even consider dating someone from an Islamic background.
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These Islamophobic stereotypes are so widespread in Canadian society that even the participants who are generally open to being in interracial unions with South Asians do not want to be in relationships with Muslim South Asians. Even when their experiences with Muslim partners were positive, they did not want to risk entering another relationship with a Muslim. They feared that their Muslim partners and their families would force them to convert to Islam. Both Black and White women worried that they will be forced to wear a hijab, give up their careers and be subservient to their husbands. 

Blog post by Mélodine Sommier, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
 
Discussions about racism and whiteness regularly make the headlines in France. In May 2026, this included, for instance, the Parliament adopting a law to restitute cultural items looted during colonial rule as well as polemics around white savior syndrome and racist stereotypes in a politician’s comic book. How do these recurrent national conversations translate into and permeate everyday life and everyday places?

In my Identities article, ‘Navigating the city, negotiating whiteness: white women’s experiences in and perceptions of Bordeaux (France)’, I look at how white women make sense of (their) whiteness as they talk about their experiences in the city of Bordeaux. One of the aims of the study was to complement research identifying discursive and rhetorical patterns of white talk. How is whiteness built into and reproduced through the things we (don’t) say? Since whiteness works on the premise that it is invisibilized, connecting it to space gives grounds to make visible the unsaid and the erased. After all, space is also a form of discourse, a terrain similar to other discursive practices where meanings are reproduced, contested, imagined and imbued with power relations.

Blog post by Fatma Haron, Office for Equal Opportunities, Landkreis Potsdam-Mittelmark, Germany, and Florian Ohmacht, Vorarlberg University of Applied Science, Austria

Questions of identity have become increasingly politicized all over the world again, which materialize in debates about migration, citizenship and belonging dominating headlines, while everyday encounters – from job applications to classroom interactions – continue to shape who is seen as  ‘inside’ or  ‘outside’. Yet, despite the intensity of these debates, identity itself remains far from fixed. Instead, it is fluid, negotiated, and deeply shaped by context.

Our Identities article, ‘Experiences of racism in postmigrant rural Austria: between discursive inclusivity and experiential exclusion’, speaks directly to this tension, exploring how individuals – both migrantized individuals but also individuals read as ‘locals’ – navigate identity in situations where social expectations, institutional categories, and personal experiences do not neatly align. Rather than treating identity as something stable or easily defined, the article shows how it is continuously made and remade through everyday practices and experiences.