Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the second generation of Muslims in Czechia and the negotiation of their identities. How do these young people of migrant origin cope with their otherness in the context of Czech society, and what uncertainties do they face in the different temporalities of their adolescence?

Paper long abstract:

Muslims are framed in public discourse as European "others" (Shaker, van Lanen, van Hoven, 2022). This is not the case in the Czech Republic, where Muslims have to cope with their ascribed foreignness, despite being actively involved in Czech civil society. The second generation of Muslims in the Czech Republic moved between multiple cultural frameworks, transnational fields. Their socialization took place in the context of a Muslim family, but they grew up primarily in the context of the Czech environment. We are talking about young Muslims, descendants of migrants who came to Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1990s as part of student and labour migration. They negotiate their identity situationally and have to come to terms with their relationship to the country of origin of their parents, with ethnicity, and with national identity. The otherness of their childhood and adolescence is shaped by an experience that their parents do not have. “Temporality is the product of both the transnationality of migrants' lives as well as the realities of the structures and systems of that they are part of” (Baas and Yeoh, 2019: 166). The key temporalities of institutional, religious, peer or familial that these young people go through generate uncertainties. Therefore, I ask what strategies they use to become socially relevant in the environment of the Czech, predominantly atheist society.