Browsing by Subject "prejudices"

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Access status: Open Access ,
Muslim women in the mirror: the stigma of Muslim women in Poland
(Wydawnictwa AGH, 2019) Stojkow, Maria
The main objective of the paper is to recreate a strategy to deal with the stigma in the daily lives of Muslim women who decided to move permanently to Poland, and Polish women who decided to convert to Islam. The subject of the research is Muslim women who live in Poland and participated in biographical interviews. According to the interviews, an image of Muslim women based on what they themselves think was reconstructed. Their methods of dealing with everyday situations, which these women face in the country in which they live, and conflicts with their families of origin, are presented. In Poland, as shown by opinion polls, people originating from Muslim countries are perceived negatively. As a result, immigrants from these regions who stay in our country are stigmatised as the other, different, hostile and dangerous to the society. This is the result of commonly shared negative stereotypes. A very similar fate is experienced by Polish women who have converted to Islam. Living with stigma forces those stigmatised to adopt strategies that allow them to operate in a foreign country. This situation is particularly oppressive for Muslim women, who on the one hand must deal with the stigma they carry due to their otherness in the host country, while on the other hand must follow tradition and constraints imposed by the religion and culture in which they were raised. Muslim clothing allows fast and easy categorization. Women wearing hijabs are easily identified, and because of it possible stereotypes and prejudices are activated.
Access status: Open Access ,
Transformacje postaw wobec Arabów w społeczeństwie polskim z perspektywy członków społeczności arabskiej i muzułmańskiej
(Wydawnictwa AGH, 2020) Pędziwiatr, Konrad
In spite of numerous studies exploring the attitudes of Polish society towards followers of Islam including Arabs or studies showing how Polish media shapes the image of Muslims and Islam, there are hardly any analyses assessing how these attitudes and images are perceived by the minority group. The purpose of this text is to fill this gap and analyse the perception of transformation of attitudes in contemporary Polish society towards Arabs from the perspective of members of the Arab and Muslim communities. The article’s analytical frame- work builds upon the conceptions problematizing a group sense of alienation and familiarity in the context of human mobility and immobility. In particular, the text shows the usefulness of the concept of otherness and strangeness developed by Ewa Nowicka in the late 1990s for the analysis of the transformation of attitudes towards Arabs and Muslims in Polish society in the last two decades.