For three days after the 9/11 attacks, hundreds of angry suburbanites gathered to surround and lay siege to the bounded neighborhood hosting the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview, Illinois. I concluded from a two and one-half year ethnographic study of the post-9/11 experience of Arab Muslims in metropolitan Chicago that the underlying sociological conditions giving rise to these post-9/11 events were racialized and nativist understandings held by a significant proportion of southwest suburban whites that positioned Arab and Muslim Americans as cultural threats to their communities. Armed with this knowledge, I designed a research project, outlined here, that included a social action component with the objective of expediting the social and civic integration of Arab and Muslim Americans in metropolitan Chicago.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/louise-cainkar/31/
Journal of Applied Social Science, Vol. 1, No. 1 (March 1, 2007: 7-15. DOI.