Being, Becoming and Belonging: Young Muslim Women in Contemporary Britain

This paper is based on a piece of inter-generational research that follows up the young Muslim girls and their families who took part in my PhD research 15 years previously. In this paper I present the 'everydayness' of these same young Muslim women, many of whom now work and some have children of their own. The theme threading through the paper is Young's notion of a reversal of structures of tolerance (Theoretical Criminology, 3, 387-407, 1999). I use this to explore the nexus of religion, culture, identities and education. The paper argues that a re-structuring of structures of tolerance over the 15 years between both pieces of research has influenced the playfulness of these individuals to dance with the discourses positioning them.