MEDIATING THE MUSLIM PUBLIC SPHERE: VOICE, IDENTITY, AND INCLUSION IN CONTEMPORARY MEDIA ENVIRONMENTS

This research project adopts a three-article format unified by the theme of media-enabled public sphere formation in non-Western Muslim contexts to explore and understand how Muslim voices are mediated in contemporary media environments, with particular attention to questions of voice, identity, and inclusion across minority and majority settings. While each article addresses a distinct empirical problem utilizing a particular case study and employs its own methodological design, collectively they form a coherent investigation of mediated Muslim participation in the public sphere. The first article, “Minority Radio in the United Kingdom: The Case of a Muslim Radio Station in Yorkshire”, examines how community-based broadcasting functions as a deliberative space for minority voices within a Western context. The second article, “Deliberative Discourses in Digital Spaces: Unpacking the Deliberative Qualities of Online Forums in Oman”, explores how citizens navigate expression, authority, and inclusivity within a semi-authoritarian context. Finally, the third article, “Mediating Religious Authority and Women’s Rights: Self‑Identified Religious Omani Female Influencers in the Digital Public Sphere”, focuses on how gendered authority, religiosity, and digital visibility shape deliberative participation in online spaces. Together, the three studies offer a perspective on how diverse actors use their platforms – community radio, online public forums, and social media – to construct space for voice, identity, and authority. Exploring the Muslim public sphere is especially significant given that dominant Western models of the public sphere have tended to marginalize or exclude religious and minority perspectives.
This project adopts an integrated theoretical framework that combines scholarly conceptions of voice and participatory parity with postcolonial perspectives on power and representation that counter Western epistemological dominance. Further, it follows a comparative, multi-sited, and mixed methods approach to investigate how the Muslim public sphere is mediated across different socio-political and media environments.
Examining both Western minority and Middle Eastern majority contexts, this project highlights the diverse ways in which Muslim voice, identity, and inclusion are mediated. It contributes to ongoing scholarly efforts to rethink the media as a mediated public sphere, offering both conceptual innovation and empirical depth to the fields of public sphere theory and political communication. The analysis underscores that communication is not only a vehicle of expression but a site of struggle over legitimacy, authority, and belonging.