Paper short abstract:

In this presentation, I focus on the ways in which a moral panic about halal slaughter, and purported "crisis of multiculturalism" in Britain shape white British slaughter workers' racialised perceptions of the violence of their labour.

Paper long abstract:

Halal slaughter is a practice which is repeatedly invoked in British right wing media and political discourses to rhetorically construct Muslims as essential Others with incompatible, backwards, violent tendencies. Conspiratorial narratives about the Islamification of Britain are centred on the fear that the nation, its laws, schools and supermarkets, are being infiltrated by incommensurable Islamic practices (Pertwee, 2017). Such perceptions are recited to construct "moral panics", and claim that multiculturalism is in crisis, if not doomed to failure, or already dead (Lentin & Titley, 2011).

This presentation is based on ethnographic research with white British slaughtermen - who are not Muslim - employed in halal slaughterhouses. Drawing on Asad’s (2003; 2006) conceptualisation of the “religious” and the “secular,” I explore how slaughtermen navigate the violent associations of their labour through notions of morality and the “rule of law.” I argue that slaughtermen have a fluid and negotiated approach to naming violence and subtly resist drawing hard moral differences between non-stun halal and “conventional” slaughter. Yet, anti-Muslim discourses feed into their negotiations of the moral issue of violence implicit in their labour. I demonstrate how the "imagined figure" of the threatening Muslim Other (Goldberg, 2009; Razack, 2022) permeates their constructions of Muslim consumers, accreditation agencies and slaughter practices, emerging as racisms which fracture workplaces which could otherwise hold the potential for solidarities across difference.