Food, fashion, and music practices are important ways of saying something about self, society, belonging, and religion. Issues of taste, distinction, and power are intrinsically related to them. Through the performance of these practices, people align and disaffiliate with different groups and styles at different moments and in various settings, thus creating and erasing boundaries between them. 

The aim of the conference is to analyse in specific contexts Muslims’ performance of food, fashion, and music practices. We are particularly interested in the life of things from makers to audiences, in the relationship between the global and the local, and in the ways in which ideas about these practices help to form ideologies of groups and their boundaries. The main questions that we pose are the following:

• How do Muslim public figures—professionals, celebrities, influencers, artists—talk about self, society, belonging, and religion through food, fashion, and music practices and to what audiences?

• When, how, and why do particular food, fashion, and music practices become identified as “Muslim” practices, by whom and with what consequences? How does this categorization settle on particular groups or persons, and how does it channel and constrain their position and activity?

• Or, by contrast, when, how, and why does the identification of those practices with religion disappear, leading to the prioritization of other features of social life in the narratives of those practices, and again by whom?

• How do individual tastes and personal preferences in food, fashion, and music interact with regulation and standardization established by arbiters, authorities, and legal frameworks?