Youth and ‘political spirituality’: the emergence of a sub-culture among new Muslims in the West?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on Foucault’s concept of ‘political spirituality’, I show how some new young converts to Islam interpret being Muslim within a framework that positions them as agents at the forefront of new social and political forces of change. My ethnographic research took place among young people who have embraced Islam or feel attracted to this religion in the Canadian province of Quebec, where Muslims constitute a small percentage of the population. Based on my findings, I examine cases of new Muslims who have appropriated Islamic beliefs and practices as a form of ‘counter-conduct’ that, recalling Foucault’s concept of ‘political spirituality’, conveys alternative ideological, social, and ecological orders, specifically in terms of social justice and equity. I show that their commitment derives from a specific understanding of social activism that relies on the inner work of the individual. Following the postulate of the British Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, I argue that youth offers a vantage point from which to grasp general social transformations. My interlocutors’ paths within or toward Islam are part of an original process of constructing a specific youth sub-culture within Western secular societies through which they introduce new patterns of community or sociality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".