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AbstractIn recent years, Muslims have become more visibly invested in humanitarian work in France. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Marseille, this article examines local initiatives to care for precarious others whose lives are neither materially supported nor socially recognized within the current French political regime. Engaging with critical French scholarship on humanitarianism as care for others associated with emergency, suffering and the politics of compassion, I show how food-distribution (maraudes) by Muslim-run humanitarian associations also draw from Islamic ethics of care. While social dynamics related to gender, class, race and generation structure the maraudes, the foregrounding of shared precarity, and of religious duty and piety over pity, challenges the 'hierarchies of deservingness' established by humanitarian border regimes. In caring for precarious others, Muslims must navigate both the secular suspicion directed towards Islam and the securitization of migration. Carrying out the religious duty of helping those in need, they are 'laying claim to public space' for both Muslims and precarious migrants.

This article focuses on recent French efforts to expand legal regulation of religious symbols to childcare. Controversies over 'veiled nannies' serve as points of departure for investigating laïcité – French secularism – through which religion is regulated. The investigation is based on fieldwork among Muslim women in Marseille and on the analysis of legal decisions, official documents, and media. The debates on whether to legislate on religious symbols in the domain of childcare reveal how the line between religion and politics, and private and public is continuously redrawn through state efforts to cultivate and govern (secular) Republican selves. Drawing on Agrama's [2012a. Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty and the Rule of Law in Egypt. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press] conceptualisation of secularism as a 'problem-space', I argue that legal regulation of religious symbols institutionalises a 'secular suspicion' at the heart of efforts to imagine and govern French society and its future, a future in which Muslims increasingly find it difficult to imagine themselves. ; publishedVersion

This essay addresses the question of how irregular migration is framed in Western media from the location of the migration researcher. What challenges and dilemmas do media frames and practices of framing create for researchers' participation in communicating research about irregular migration to the public? The essay is written in dialogue with topics raised by the articles in the special issue and seeks to supplement, and at times interrogate, its scrutiny of how irregular migration is covered in the news and received by the audience.

This article critically addresses recent anthropological and feminist efforts to theorize and analyse Muslim women's participation in and support for the Islamic revival in its various manifestations. Drawing on ethnographic material from research on young Muslims engaged in Islamic youth and student-organizations in Norway, I investigate some of the challenges that researching religious subjectivities and practices pose to feminist theory. In particular, I deal with how to understand women's religious piety in relation to questions of self, agency and resistance. Engaging with Saba Mahmood's work on The Politics of Piety, this article suggests ways of understanding the young women's religious engagement that move beyond the confines of a binary model of subordination and resistance, coercion and choice. Grounding the discussion in ethnographic analysis of how young Muslim women in Norway speak about the 'self', I argue that critically revisiting feminist notions of agency, autonomy and desire, is necessary in order to understand the kinds of self-realization that these women aspire to. However, the article argues against positing Muslim conceptions and techniques of the self as 'the other' of liberal-secular traditions. Rather, I show how configurations of personhood, ethics and self-realization drawn from Islamic and liberal-secular discursive formations inhabit not only the same cultural and historical space, but also shape individual subjectivities and modes of agency.

Résumé L'installation durable en Norvège d'immigrants musulmans et de leurs descendants a fait de l'islam la deuxième religion du pays. Cet article s'intéresse aux membres d'associations de jeunes et d'étudiants installées à Oslo, et à la façon dont ils militent pour redéfinir ce que signifie aujourd'hui être musulman en Norvège. Selon l'auteur, qui étudie la production de la catégorie des « musulmans norvégiens », et la manière dont les jeunes musulmans l'adoptent, la rejettent ou la négocient, cette nouvelle identité se forge à partir des discours et des pratiques de l'État-nation, mais aussi des discours et des pratiques de l'islam transnational. Les jeunes musulmans, ainsi formés et autoformés comme citoyens-sujets, ne passent pas par une adaptation passive aux normes dominantes, mais par un processus complexe de négociation qui implique une « participation » plutôt qu'une « intégration ».

AbstractIn this article we explore the role of music in shaping and publicizing religious and political subjectivities and belonging among young Muslims in Norway. The article discusses practices of producing and listening to music in light of theories about 'counterpublics' and their soundscapes, the religious and the secular, and majority-minority relations. Musical soundscapes produced and consumed by young Muslims, the article argues, give voice to experiences and sentiments that are marginalized within mainstream cultural productions, and articulate both consensus and dissensus with national political institutions' concepts and norms.

Introduction: Unpacking the temporalities of irregular migration / Christine M. Jacobsen, Marry-Anne Karlsen -- The violence of accelerated time : waiting and hasting during 'the long summer of migration' in Greece / Katerina Rozakou -- 'They said wait, wait -- and I waited' : the power-chronographies of waiting for asylum in France / Christine M. Jacobsen -- Filling the apps : the smartphone, time and the refugee / Thomas Hylland Eriksen -- Mo's challenge. Waiting and the question of methodological nationalism / Kari Anne Drangsland -- Migration control, temporal irregularity and waiting : undocumented Zimbabwean migrants' experiences of deportability in South Africa / Johannes Machinya -- Waiting out the condition of illegality in Norway / Marry-Anne Karlsen -- 'Go Fund Me' : LGBTI asylum seekers in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya / B. Camminga -- The truth of the body as controversial evidence : an investigation into age assessments of migrant minors in France / Sandrine Musso -- An end to asylum? Temporary protection and the erosion of refugee status / Jessica Schultz -- 'Doin' hard time on Planet Earth' : migrant detainability, disciplinary power, and the disposability of life / Nicholas De Genova -- Afterword: Waiting, a state of consciousness / Shahram Khosravi.