Islamophobia Conference

The Use and Abuse of the Islamophobia Framework in US Higher Education
April 2-4, 2026 | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

For over two decades, scholars have studied the racialization of Islam, arguing thatIslamophobia is better understood as anti-Muslim racism. They have pointed out that this formof discrimination is not contained to questions of religious freedom, but also impacts Muslims’experiences with surveillance, policing, immigration, employment, and media narratives. Theidea of racialization was an important intervention and framing that helped shift the conversationfrom a focus on individual and interpersonal bias to systemic targeting that marks Muslims, andthose mistaken for Muslim, as threats to US national security.

More recently, scholars are complicating our understanding of the history and evolution ofIslamophobia/anti-Muslim bias, especially in the US, arguing that it emerged from anti-Palestinian agendas. Since the genocide in Gaza began, reported cases of Islamophobia/anti-Muslim racism on campuses have risen dramatically. Universities across the country havehyper-focused on Islamophobia, offering staff trainings, hosting campus symposia, hiring staff toserve Muslim students, and creating task forces on Islamophobia for informed direction toaddress the bias. Simultaneously, universities have also rapidly changed their policies tosuffocate campus protests, raise disciplinary (and sometimes criminal) cases against protestors,and squash campus activism, particularly targeting Palestinian liberation.

This conference aims to conceptually and empirically interrogate the relationship betweenIslamophobia & anti-Palestinian agendas and understand how developments on campusesimpact both issues and their intersection. Are campuses using Islamophobia towards theerasure of Palestine? Is there a crack in the theoretical framework of Islamophobia that mayhave facilitated such erasure? What has the genocide illuminated about the uses and limitationsof Islamophobia/anti-Muslim racism as terms and frameworks? What can we learn from theexperiences of repression on campuses after October 7 that may inform new directions the fieldof Islamophobia Studies? Can campus efforts to counter Islamophobia succeed without firstidentifying the myriad of ways Islamophobia manifests, including as anti-Palestinian, and fullyunderstanding how it can be used and abused against its own objectives?