Emily Laxer

York University · Department of Sociology

Alberta, Canada is both a major extractive zone—home to the world’s third largest proven oil reserves, mostly in the form of oil sands located in the north of the province—and a place whose political culture has been profoundly influenced by evangelical Christianity. It is both “petro province” and “God’s province”. Despite these distinct political...

Muslim women’s experience of social exclusion is pronounced across Western societies. This study assesses the expectation that legislated headscarf bans reinforce that experience, strengthening social boundaries. Our data source is interviews and focus groups with headscarf-wearing women in three distinct policy contexts: republican-secularist Fran...

This article shows that differences in the economic incorporation of Muslims and other immigrant minorities in France and in Canada are mainly related to immigrant selectivity, labor market structures, and welfare transfers. Differences in ethno-specific penalties due to national cultural frames — related to multiculturalism in Canada and secular r...

What we understand by the ‘Middle East’ has changed over time and across space. While scholars agree that the geographical ‘core’ of the Middle East is the Arabian Peninsula, the boundaries are less clear. How far back in time should we go to define the Middle East? How far south and east should we move on the African continent? And how do we deal...

Although the populism-religion relationship is increasingly recognized in the literature, the focus has predominantly been on Western cases. This article proposes analytical tools for global comparisons. First, drawing on the ideational, performative, and strategic approaches to populism, the authors articulate how populists deploy religion in each...

In Politicizing Islam, Z. Fareen Parvez offers a timely new approach to studying Islamic revival movements in cross-national perspective. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and thirty-nine interviews with Muslim activists, community leaders, politicians, teachers, and middle- and working-class residents in Lyon, France and Hyderabad, Indi...

This study examines the impact of national contexts on the political and civic incorporation of Muslim minorities by comparing France and Canada, with their sharply contrasting national integration ‘models’. Using large and comparable national surveys of immigrant minorities (French Trajectories and Origins Survey, 2008; Canadian Ethnic Diversity S...

In July 2010, following a year-long nationwide debate over Islamic veiling, the French government passed a law prohibiting facial coverings in all public spaces. Prior research attributes this and other restrictive laws to France's republican secular tradition. This article takes a different approach. Building on literature that sees electoral poli...

Analysing parties’ media representations in the context of France’s 2010 legal ban of Islamic facial coverings and Québec’s (rejected) Charter of Values in 2013, this paper foregrounds the neglected role that party competition plays in shaping the construction of nationhood in public debates around immigrant religious practices. Our findings show t...

This article compares the social experiences of Muslim minorities in three contexts – France, Québec, and English Canada – each reflecting a different approach to immigrant integration. France’s republican model emphasises cultural assimilation and the exclusion of religion from the public sphere; Canada’s multicultural model advocates official rec...

Cet article cherche à préciser la relation entre la politique et la culture dans le processus de construction de la nationalité dans les sociétés diversifiées. À partir d’une analyse approfondie des débats des principaux partis politiques autour de la Charte des valeurs québécoises (2013), nous jugeons que cette relation a deux dimensions principal...

Given their precarious position within larger states, national minorities cannot rely on federal governments to affirm their nationhood. Moreover, insofar as nationhood is predicated on a shared history, language and culture, immigrants place additional strains on the maintenance of national distinctiveness and the political claims that derive from...