Dr Amani Hassani on Navigating Islamophobia in Denmark

To launch our 2021/22 CoDE lunchtime seminars, Dr. Amani Hassani presents a case study of how Danish Muslims experience Islamophobia in everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Copenhagen, the paper unpacks the experiences of racialization in Denmark – a ‘colorblind’ progressive liberal nation – where little attention is given to racialized power dynamics that are reproduced in everyday interactions. Structural Islamophobia is promoted through political discourse and mainstreaming of anti-Muslim racism, which inadvertently trickles down to everyday social and spatial encounters.

Speaker biography:

Dr. Amani Hassani is an urban ethnographer working at the intersection of sociology, anthropology, and geography. Her work explores the interplay between racialization and spatialization with a specific focus on Muslims in the Global North. Her Ph.D. research was a comparative ethnography of young Muslims’ urban lives in Denmark and Quebec exploring issues of class, socialization, and urban life.

She holds an MA in Anthropology from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) and a Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Analysis from Concordia University (Canada). She’s currently the Sociological Review Fellow 2020/21.