The UC Santa Barbara MultiCultural Center’s highly anticipated Diversity Lecture will be presented on the topic of Islamophobia with Moustafa Bayoumi entitled “The Muslim American Life: Crushing Islamophobia with Countercultures of Resistance” on at 6 p.m. Thursday, May 5, 2016, in the MCC Theater.

Bayoumi will discuss the question of how we should understand the nature of contemporary Islamophobia, what motivates and sustains it and who gains by it.

He will examine the ways the media, law and politics mutually reinforce each other in viewing Muslims as potentially dangerous outsiders.

Bayoumi will also address a growing “War on Terror counterculture” — which, by resisting the stereotypes and challenging the prevailing narratives of the “War on Terror,” fights not only for the rights of Muslim Americans but for the civil liberties of all.

Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror.

His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, The Guardian, The National, CNN.com, The London Review of Books, The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Progressive and other places.

He currently lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., and is a professor of English at Brooklyn College. For more information, visit www.moustafabayoumi.com.

— Carol Dinh is the publicist and marketing coordinator at the UCSB MultiCultural Center.