This fellowship examines the impacts of Islamophobia on the mental health of young Muslims living in Greater Manchester. Islamophobia is ordinary in white-majority global north states (Khan, 2022) and has been linked to increased stress and anxiety amongst young Muslims (Bunglawala, 2022), with young Muslims showing the highest rate of self-directed harm of all religious groups (Awaad et al., 2021). Compounding the problem, young Muslims have nowhere to turn to for help due to the lack of culturally sensitive mental health support and a ‘culture of silence within families' around mental ill-health (Khan and Ahmed 2022:12).

Previous research in the field has primarily adopted a quantitative approach. This, however, has resulted in the in-depth personal experiences of young Muslims born into post-9/11 Islamophobia being neglected (Farooqui and Kaushik, 2022). Further, the use of the BAME designation in quantitative studies masks the disparities between ethnic groups, leading to inaccurate representations of the mental health of different ethnic groups (Adebiyi et al., 2021). To address these shortcomings, this project will adopt a pioneering participatory approach that focuses exclusively on young Muslims’ counter-stories of Islamophobia and the impact of this on their mental health and well-being. In doing so, it will co-produce new forms of knowledge that are situated, in-depth, youth-informed, and youth-led. These novel ways of understanding will accelerate scholarship in multiple disciplines that is concerned with racial justice, the intersecting structural constraints for young people’s mental health and the promises and limitations of innovative methodologies. In doing so it engages with fundamental sociological concerns about social (re)creation and untangling the relationship between individual agents and social structures. The co-produced outputs will identify young people’s ideas and recommendations for developing policies, practices, and services to increase young Muslim’s access to and engagement with mental health support.