European Sociological Association Annual Conference 2019

Activity: Participating in or organising an event types › Participation in conference

Martin Myers (Presented paper), 2019

School of Education & Sociology

Presented paper on 'Education and Migration'

2019

European Sociological Association Annual Conference 2019: Europe and Beyond: Boundaries, Barriers and Belonging

Duration	20 Aug 2019 → 23 Aug 2019
Location of event	University of Manchester
City	Manchester
Country	United Kingdom
Web address (URL)	https://www.europeansociology.org/about-esa-2019
Degree of recognition	International event

Event: Conference

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This paper examines the experiences of Muslim families who choose to home school their children drawing upon a larger project exploring a diverse range of home schoolers. The work of Ulrich Beck (1992, 2006) is used to discuss how ‘risk’ is understood for Muslim homeschoolers often by conflating global fears of Islamification within local settings such as schools. Home schooling in the UK is subject to very low thresholds of regulation and this has increasingly led to concerns about child safeguarding and educational outcomes. There has been a noticeable trend however, for identifications of home schooled children being ‘at risk’, to seemingly reflect preconceptions about ethnicity, class or religious affiliation (Bhopal and Myers, 2018) Often Ethnic minority and poorer homeschoolers, are more readily identified as putting their children ‘at risk’ than their white, middle class counterparts. Muslim homeschoolers have been singled out by the schools inspectorate OFSTED as putting their children ‘at risk’ by using the lax regulation of home schooling as ‘cover’ for radicalising children. This has emerged against wider political and media discourses in which Muslims are portrayed as promoting narrow, religious curriculums out of step with mainstream society. Our findings suggest that many Muslim homeschoolers, like other BME families, use it as a strategy avoid racism within schools. A vicious circle emerges in which Muslim children encounter racism and bullying at school because of their religious background, causing families to withdraw children from school, which feeds further narratives in which Muslim communities are demonised.

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Outputs

Home Schooling and Home Education: Race, Class and Inequality
Research output: Book/Report › Book
Muslims, home education and risk in British society
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

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ID: 15316059

European Sociological Association Annual Conference 2019

European Sociological Association Annual Conference 2019: Europe and Beyond: Boundaries, Barriers and Belonging

Links

Related information

Outputs

Home Schooling and Home Education: Race, Class and Inequality

Muslims, home education and risk in British society

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