Sarah Cheikh Husain

Project Title: Countering Islamophobia: the Role of Muslim Community Organisations as Agents for Positive Change

Supervision Team: Prof. Fethi Mansouri & Prof. Shahram Akbarzadeh.

Biography: Sarah Cheikh Husain is a PhD student at Deakin university. She is the recipient of PhD Scholarship for the UNESCO Chair for Comparative Research on Cultural Diversity and Social Justice. Her previous research examined the representation of Arabs and Muslims as a minority group in picture books published in Western countries by adopting textual and semiotic critical analysis framework. Her current PhD research examines the Muslim Community Organisations in Australia to understand how they perceive Islamophobia and how they mobilise and engage to respond to the problem however with great attention to their context as agents operating within a field of power relations. To capture the dynamics of this agent-structure relations, she deploys Stones’ ‘Strong Structuration theory’ as a conceptual and an analytical tool.