October 16–17, 2026  |  University of California, Berkeley

Sponsored by the Islamophobia Studies Center, the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project, and the Islamophobia Studies Journal

We are living through a moment of intensifying and multilayered Islamophobia, a crisis that is at once local and global, discursive and material, electoral and geopolitical. From the shooting in San Diego, the demonization underway in Texas and Florida, to attacks on mosques in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, and India, violence directed at Muslims and their institutions is no longer episodic; it is a structural feature of the contemporary political landscape. The Islamophobia Studies Center, the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project, and the Islamophobia Studies Journal invite submissions for a two-day international conference at the University of California, Berkeley, dedicated to documenting, theorizing, and responding to this rising tide.

The crisis is not confined to street-level violence. The intense deployment of Islamophobic rhetoric has created—and continues to sustain—public support for the genocide in Gaza and Sudan, war crimes in Lebanon, and military attacks on Iran. The dehumanization of Muslims in media, policy, and political discourse functions as a license: it renders Muslim life ungrievable and makes mass violence thinkable, defensible, and fundable. Understanding how Islamophobia operates as the ideological infrastructure of war-making is a central concern of this conference.

At the same time, Muslim civic and religious institutions in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and across Europe face escalating attacks—attacks that are increasingly linked to the rising tide of White Nationalism and the moral panic centered on the “Great Replacement,” a conspiracy theory that mobilizes White fear and resentment and packages it into votes and electoral campaigns. Islamophobia has become a reliable currency of electoral politics, traded openly by parties and movements that have moved conspiracy from the fringe to the platform.

A further thread demanding scholarly attention is the massive resources being deployed by Israel through the Hasbara network, which has struck a deep alliance with the governments of the UAE, Morocco, and Jordan—not to mention India—to reshape public support for Israel after its identification in Western public opinion with the genocide. This coordinated effort to launder state violence through public relations, digital influence operations, and interstate partnerships represents a new chapter in the global production of Islamophobia, one that binds together propaganda, normalization, and repression across borders.

The technological dimension of this crisis demands particular attention. Artificial intelligence has become a central instrument in the surveillance of Muslim communities and in the reproduction of Islamophobia at scale—from predictive policing and automated watchlisting to biometric monitoring and algorithmic profiling. At the same time, AI-driven content moderation and recommendation systems systematically censor Muslim and Palestinian voices while amplifying Israeli state narratives and White supremacist discourse, encoding Islamophobia into the very architecture of the digital public sphere. The result is an information order in which those documenting atrocity are silenced and those justifying it are algorithmically rewarded.

Against this backdrop, we seek contributions from academics, independent scholars, community-based researchers, and cultural producers who are documenting and engaging in responses to this multilayered crisis. We are interested not only in analysis but in resistance and responses: the organizing, litigation, art, journalism, archiving, tech innovation and community defense through which Muslims and their allies are contesting Islamophobia across the world.

Themes and Topics

We welcome submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following areas:

·  Anti-Muslim violence and attacks on mosques and Muslim institutions in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, India, France, Palesitne, Lebanon and beyond

·  Islamophobic rhetoric and the manufacturing of consent for the genocide in Gaza and Sudan, war crimes in Lebanon, and attacks on Iran

·  White Nationalism, the Great Replacement conspiracy, and the electoral packaging of anti-Muslim fear and resentment

·  The Hasbara network and state-sponsored influence operations, including alliances with Western elites, UAE, Morocco, Jordan, and India

·  Hindutva, European far-right movements, and the transnational circulation of Islamophobic ideology and resources

·  Artificial intelligence and the surveillance of Muslim communities: predictive policing, watchlisting, biometric monitoring, and algorithmic profiling

·  AI, algorithmic bias, and the reproduction of Islamophobia; content moderation and platform governance that censor Muslim and Palestinian voices while amplifying Israeli and White supremacist voices

·  Media and social media platforms in the production and amplification of anti-Muslim discourse

·  Surveillance, securitization, immigration enforcement, and the policing of Muslim communities

·  Legal and policy responses; civil rights litigation, hate crime documentation, and legislative advocacy

·  Gendered Islamophobia and the targeting of Muslim women, youth, and visibly Muslim bodies

·  Campus repression, attacks on academic freedom, and the silencing of scholarship on Palestine

·  Community-based research, archiving, and the documentation of Islamophobia at the grassroots

·  Cultural production as resistance-film, literature, music, visual art, and performance

·  Interfaith, intercommunal, and transnational solidarities against racism and Islamophobia

·  Theorizing Islamophobia: racialization, coloniality, empire, and the longue durée of anti-Muslim racism

Who Should Submit

We invite submissions from academics across all disciplines, independent scholars, community-based researchers, organizers, journalists, legal practitioners, and cultural producers. We especially encourage contributions from early-career scholars, graduate students, and those working outside the university whose documentation and creative work engage the lived realities of Islamophobia.

Submission Formats

·  Individual paper presentations of 300 words submission that has the exact title of the paper. A 100 word biography to be used for program purposes.  Proposals for cultural and artistic works should include a description of the work and any technical requirements.  Your email, academic or professional title if applicable.  Selected papers presented at the conference will be considered for publication in a special issue of the Islamophobia Studies Journal, subject to peer review.

·  Pre-constituted panels (3–4 papers with a chair)

·  Community-based research and documentation projects

·  Film screenings, artistic works, tech project and other forms of cultural production

Important Dates

·  Abstract submission deadline: August 15th, 2026

·  Notification of acceptance: September 10th, 2026

·  Conference: October 16–17, 2026, University of California, Berkeley

·  Full papers due for journal consideration after the conference.

Contact

For questions regarding the conference or submissions, please contact:

Umer Mahmood - mahmoodumer@hotmail.com

Islamophobia Studies Center