JOUR3111 Progress Report.

Religion has always been a part of Australia’s unique diversity and the history of Muslims residing in this country dates back over one hundred years. However in a post 9/11 world, it seems that there exists a growing anti-sentiment in the minds of some in the west. Horrifying terrorist activity by a few Islamic extremists have spilled blood on the television screens over the world, which in turn plants the seed of hatred and fear inside the hearts of the people, especially those which have had very little contact with other religions and cultures.

Hello everyone, so this was the introduction to my pitch in the last assessment and I feel I will keep this for my story in the final project. However, some integral aspects of my story have changed.

After some anti-Islamic riots that had occurred in Brisbane I had originally decided to focus on this as my story and to research whether or not there is a growing anti-Islamic sentiment that is occurring in Australia. However, as this was a one-time event and it was proving difficult to source people from this side of the fence, I thought my story may be turning a little unbalanced. 

So instead of focusing on whether there was a hatred of Muslim in this country, I thought it would be better to approach this topic with a new idea for a human interest piece which would ask: 

What is it like to be a Muslim living in Australia?

  

I want to know what it feels like to be a Muslim living in Australia at the current time. I feel that this approach would be much less rigid and would leave room for more research and stories, which could then develop on their own and create a story naturally, rather than forcing this angle about anti-Islamic sentiments when I do not have enough of my own research to prove this to be the case in Brisbane.

So with this new angle I feel I can have a lot more scope for a good, balanced investigative journalism piece and it will humanise the story a lot more. 

So far I have posted up a photo slideshow from an Islamic cultural event that was held recently, I went along with my camera and photographed the day. Although it was a small event I feel that these photos represent that there is indeed a Muslim community in Brisbane and these photographs can tell a small story about their lives and provide a snippet of what it is like to be a Muslim in Australia.

This can be found here:

Photo Slideshow

I also have an interview with Sylvie Shaw, who is a lecturer of Religion and Spirituality Studies here at the University of Queensland and felt that her expertise within this course may offer me some academic integrity and insight into this topic that I had was not previously aware of. This interview will take place on Thursday, the 14^th of May so I will post the result on the google plus community. 

I had also scheduled a meeting with tutor at this university, Humaira Shafi, however due to her own circumstances she will not be able to participate in this for another two weeks but I have booked in an interview with her for then and she is more than happy to help. Humaira is a Pakistani Muslim who teaches here at UQ and felt her personal experience would be a valuable component to my story. 

I have also contact Ali Kadri who is the president of the Holland Park mosque and is the spokesperson of Islamic council of Queensland and he said he will be happy to help. We are yet to arrange a meeting but I am hopeful that his input would put an interesting angle on this topic. 

I have also been in touch with the UQ Islamic society however with everyone’s exams coming up it will be a bit hard to arrange an interview with students here, so I have reached out to the broader Facebook community in Brisbane and have already found one girl who would be happy to have me interview her.

I have also contacted Annie Pohlman, who is the head lecturer of Indonesian here at UQ and have confirmed that I will arrange an interview with her in the coming week. Given her position, I thought her insight into this topic would be valuable seeing as Indonesia has the highest Muslim population in the world and is a close neighbour of ours. Furthermore, we have many Muslim Indonesian students studying at the University of Queensland and Annie said she can arrange for an interview with them as well. 

As for the audio side, I have received confirmation from the Australian Islamic Women’s Association, and as they live rather far from me I am unable to record them on camera however I will record the phone conversation between us and will post this on my blog, similar to a radio interview. 

For my final project, I will be including photographs and video interviews for the visual aspect.
 

I have also been working on a survey about attitudes towards Islam and have been disturbing this around the community with some interesting results. I will post a copy of this survey onto my blog so you can have a look at the type of questions I will be asking. I feel that the results of this survey will be an indicator on the type of attitudes people have on Muslims today.

As for displaying the results of the survey, I was thinking either Moovly or Infogram, but i'm not sure yet.

The questions that I am asking for my survey can be found here:

Survey questions

On the interview we have together on Friday, I wanted to ask everyone’s opinion on what a good interactive component of my project could be? I am having trouble to understand what this means as I am truly technologically impaired. 

Any suggestions are welcomed and I hope this shows my progress so far. See you all Friday!