This article explores how young female Muslim university students in London and Birmingham experience life in England. Through focus groups and interviews, talk about three main topics was collected: how young Muslims frame their identities; how they are perceived by others; and how they perceive Muslims to be portrayed and represented in public life. Analysis shows that the participants: presented themselves as ambitious and autonomous; experienced direct and indirect exclusion as young Muslims; perceived a lack of diverse Muslims role models and ambassadors in public life; and that, despite their optimism, felt their futures in Britain were uncertain. The young people recognised the temporary liberties they have around dress and practice as university students that are potentially restricted in wider society. The research highlights the problems created by stigmatising public discourse around Islamist extremism that fuels narrow, deficit-focused policy that exacerbates the exclusion of young Muslims.

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Introduction to the special issueReading has changed with consumer adoption of digital technologies, and its changes are many: from the new ways in which users of such technologies can now access texts to the opportunities those users now have for discussing them online. Given technological developments, changes in behaviour may seem inevitable. However, for researchers investigating reading and interpretation in the internet age, questions remain, as they do with any social activity online, about whether 'new' practices are indeed new, and about how they are inflected through mediation on the internet (Herring, 2004). How researchers -and particularly those interested in the interaction of readers with texts and of readers with one another around texts -can uncover, describe, and analyse these changes is an important emerging topic. The articles in this issue make an attempt to offer methods for investigating how the internet and associated technologies affect reading. They look in particular at how readers reproduce, appropriate, and subvert traditional practices for reading and interpreting texts in online environments. The connection between the global and local, as Androutsopoulos (2010) has shown, is dynamic and complex, with local practices and readings by individual readers influencing global practices, and global readings in public forums influencing individual readings. The effects of the connections between readers that the internet facilitates are not homogeneous, but instead manifest themselves in different online locations and forums, through different technologies, and with shifting cultural trends. The internet has offered readers new ways to interact with texts and with other readers, but how these technologies have changed behaviour and what effect these changes have on the practices of reading and interpretation is still largely unknown.At the same time as making a start on the important task of finding out how the internet matters for reading and interpretation, this special issue contributes to several 652781L AL0010.

Social Network Sites (SNS) have increasingly grown as platforms for users to publish and promote content (which includes videos, written texts, and images), in addition to interacting socially. While all published material both online and offline is normally protected by copyright laws, what constitutes copyrighted material on SNS can be difficult to distinguish. Moreover, users on these sites can have differing expectations of how their content is used and viewed by others, causing confusion around both the legal and ethical obligations of others when they use or cite others’ content. Knowing when to attribute content to users and when to protect user privacy is, therefore, a key issue for researchers, particularly linguists working with language data from SNS. Using three case studies, this article looks at content from SNS where applying copyright rules might be problematic: videos that have been published and subsequently removed from a site; user comments on videos published on YouTube and Facebook; and user comments on sites, which might be considered sensitive, such as adult video pages. I discuss the legal obligations in using this content, by first presenting examples where there is a clear legal requirement to cite the copyrighted work of users. I then highlight the ambiguity of copyright law and suggest ways problematic cases might be addressed, enabling the researcher to act both legally and ethically in copying and using online material. In conclusion, I argue based on these studies that attribution of publicly available content on SNS should be the default position, but that the effect of reproducing materials for academic purposes should be taken into account.

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