Negotiating British Muslim Identity on Twitter

In the discursive construction of intra-national sameness, religious identity is often a key criterion for inclusion or exclusion from the imagined national community. In current European discourses, the negotiation of Muslim identity and its intersection with the respective national identity category is of particular interest. In this thesis, the hashtag #WhatBritishMuslimsReallyThink was examined in order to analyze how members of the British Muslim digital community both construct and reinforce their collective identity as well as employ discursive strategies to negotiate British national identity and their national belonging in the face of exclusionary political rhetoric. Thereby, the issues addressed and the strategies of belonging employed in the Twitter conversation are embedded in a larger public discourse on British national identity and intra-national boundary making. This research investigates Twitter as a site of national and religious identity construction and sheds light on the contested nature of such identity categories.