The teams in UK, Hungary and Germany conducted a series of experimental studies to examine how the experience of misrecognition and surveillance impacts relations to the surveilling authorities and willingness to cooperate with them. These experiments aim to explore the relations between minority status, surveillance, influence and relationship towards authority. In Hungary, two experiments are conducted to measure the effects of misrecognition on willingness to cooperate with authorities or alternatively, join anti-authority groups. The experiments are conducted within university settings, and misrecognition is manipulated by making existing negative stereotypes about the groups salient and suggesting that these question belongingness. We expected the effects would be stronger among high identifiers who are more sensitive to experiences of misrecognition. The team in Germany is in the process of conducting more experiments that examine the ways in which misrecognised Muslims in Germany make sense of their experiences of misrecognition and how these experiences influence their trust in and desire for contact with the German majority. The team therefore looks at the different possible causal attributions certain minorities make to the misrecognizing person. Moreover, we claim that misrecognition is a stressful experience because the misrecognizer is often a member of the dominant group in a given society. This assumption is therefore being looked at in the experiments by manipulating the group membership of the misrecognizer. The German team also examines the impact of different ramifications (i.e., being barred from tangible or symbolic benefits) of being misrecognized on the way in which people experience misrecognition and respond to it.

The teams in France and the Netherlands examine how people are treated on adopting a symbol of minority identity, how the assumptions and reactions of others relate to their own sense of self, the extent to which there is misrecognition, how they understand these experiences, and – critically - how these people are affected by these experiences. For this, the French and Dutch teams conducted focus groups interviews with Muslim women wearing the headscarf in France and the Netherlands. Additionally, in order to examine if the choice of not wearing a headscarf could be linked to an anticipation of misrecognition, Muslim women who do not wear a headscarf participated as well in focus groups interviews in the Netherlands.

The teams in two countries, France and Germany, will first look at radicalized Muslim persons who have turned to violence and examine whether misrecognition played a role in their trajectory towards the extreme. Our main question here is: Have those who advocate conflict against society and authority experienced misrecognition and, if so, did any of these experiences played a role in their radicalization? Here we would analyse the different interrelated elements in their biographical paths that may have play a role in their radicalization processes. To this end, the German team interviewed two de-radicalized individuals in Vienna using the narrative interview technique. Second, we will follow the question: How does misrecognition appear in the online material published by radicalized individuals? To answer this question, the French and German teams will …. Critically, our aim here is not to suggest that there is something unique about Islam that tends towards radicalism, but rather whether to analyze if there is something in the way that the mainstream views, treats and excludes Muslims that leads a small minority along a radical path.

In France, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, Romania and Serbia, we will conduct a survey amongst Muslims and Roma people to examine how the experiences of misrecognition affect the relations with the authorities in the respective countries. The survey seeks to shed light on the impact that misrecognition amongst minority group members has on conflict with and estrangement from the majority society and the state authorities. The survey is expected to be launched in July 2020.

In this part of the project, we are interested in the impact of surveillance on recognition: does a sense of being watched – whether by individuals or by authorities and via technologies – lead to a sense of misrecognition? and hence to a sense of estrangement from society? Our aim is to gather some minorities’ experiences in order to spark a wider public debate about how the gaze of others shapes who we are and what we do. Specifically, in United Kingdom, we interviewed persons who perceive themselves as belonging to the Muslim community, while accompanying them as they go about their everyday business. In Hungary, we conducted interviews with members of Roma NGOs to reflect on this phenomenon based on their own experiences and regarding the Roma community and recorded everyday experiences of misrecognition with the help of Roma people with GoPro cameras and body cams. Sixteen Roma men and women participated in the project that was carried out as a collaboration between the Eötvös Loránd University (on behalf of the MisMiE team) and CEU from Budapest. Participants were instructed to record everyday experiences of misrecognition following a one-day workshop. The workshop offered them technical and legal assistance and some instructions on how to use GoPro cameras and body cams for recording. The footage was edited by Jeremy Braverman and Ádám Hushegyi (CEU) and additional interviews were recorded with the participants. The videos covered experiences of discrimination and misrecognition in the context of shopping and renting apartments. The videos will be used as part of our focus group research to be conducted where we address how these videos can be used as part of intervention programs. Please go to our “Empirical Results” section to learn more about the preliminary results of the project.

In a second phase, a new online walkthrough study will be conducted in the Netherlands, France and Germany. Here, similar data as in the walkthrough interviews will be collected, but on a larger scale. The main aim of the study is to identify locations where people feel accepted (recognized) and where they feel unaccepted (misrecognized) as being part of their national group. For example, where do Dutch Muslims feel fully accepted as being Dutch, and where do they feel unaccepted as Dutch? To do so, an online survey is developed in which participants select these two locations on an interactive map (Google Maps), and answer questions about these locations. The questions refer to what happened, why they felt (un-)accepted, the emotions the memory elicit, by whom they felt (un-)accepted, how they reacted, and importantly what would help them feel more accepted. Participants are Dutch Muslims living in Amsterdam, French Muslims living in Paris, and German Muslims living in Dortmund or Cologne. Through this study, we aim to develop an interesting map of the cities with locations where people feel (mis)recognized and the reactions these experiences incite.

Drawing on the Qualitative Content Analysis and Grounded Theory Coding method, our team in Germany looked for instances of misrecognition’s dynamics within a WhatsApp-protocol of a group of young radicals, who committed a bombing attack in Germany. The questions leading this analysis focus on the role of surveillance in and outside the group’s interrelations, on the identities’ performances of the in-group members, and on the power relations and leadership practices among the members.