Mitchell Centre Seminar Series - Lars Leszczensky (Goethe University Frankfurt) - Gendered Mechanisms of Social Segregation Among Muslim Youth
| Dates: | 29 October 2025 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 17:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Speaker: | Lars Leszczensky, |
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This talk will present findings from an ongoing research project on why friendships between Muslim and non-Muslim adolescents are relatively rare. The focus is on gender-specific processes of religious segregation within friendship networks. A key question is whether religious segregation stems from Muslims' in-group bias or non-Muslims' reluctance to befriend Muslims. Building on research on interreligious romantic relations, we argue the answer is gender-specific: Muslim girls show stronger in-group bias, while non-Muslims are more reluctant to befriend Muslim boys. In a first step, stochastic actor-oriented models on large-scale German data reveal that Muslim girls indeed exhibit strong in-group bias but are not excluded. In contrast, Muslim boys have a weak in-group bias yet are less befriended by non-Muslims. In a second step, we aim to explain gender differences in Muslim in-group bias by examining gendered endogamy norms. We test this using three pieces of evidence: (1) whether Muslim girls' bias is stronger in cross-gender friendships, (2) how the bias develops between ages 11 and 17, and (3) by analyzing direct measures of endogamy norms from non-network data.
Speaker
Lars Leszczensky,
Role: Professor of Sociology
Organisation: Goethe University Frankfurt
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2.016
Arthur Lewis Building
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