The re-aestheticisation of poverty: blogging hunger in the age of austerity

This paper examines the re-aestheticisation of hunger and poverty with the emergence of austerity blogs. These blogs, which chronicle personal narratives while re-directing gaze in creating food through limited budgets and in sharing the intimate brutalities of hunger, bring a renewed focus and interest to poverty through daily lived experiences of hunger. Beyond personalising hunger in a climate of austerity, blogs as a symbol of articulation of the laypeople for the general public become interstitial spaces between government rhetoric and media representations, making poverty an intimate, personal and present proposition. Blogs as peoples’ archives of social history are hybrid spaces of personal iterations amenable to public consumption and media scrutiny. In the process these can re-mediate and disrupt the social reality of first-world hunger, inviting a gaze through first-hand narratives. Poverty becomes a contested entity online where blogs perform both resistance and reiteration of the neo-liberal stereotypes about the unemployed and those on benefits.     

High school students’ academic causal attributions in the cultural-political context of the Arab school system in Israel

While motivation is commonly interpreted as an individual student’s characteristic, motivational perceptions and beliefs, such as causal attributions of success and failure, are embedded in cultural meanings and contextual practices. The current study aimed to investigate causal attributions among Arab high school students in Israel and to interpret them in the light of their cultural-political context. Two hundred and five 11th-grade Arab students from three different geographic regions in Israel responded to open-ended and closed survey questions about events of success and failure in school. The analysis indicated that students overwhelmingly considered exams when thinking about events of success and failure, reflecting the normative teacher-centred pedagogical practices in schools. The analysis also manifested patterns of a self-serving bias. These findings are interpreted in the light of the cultural-political characteristics of the Arab school system in Israel.     

Multi-ethnic school environment from the school leader’s perspective: challenges and approaches to improve multi-cultural competency among teachers in Malaysia

This study aims to identify the challenges and approaches to improve a multicultural competency among teachers in multi-ethnic schools environment based on school leaders’ perspective. Data collection method used in this study is qualitative method. A total of nine school leaders from the states of Kedah, Penang, and Perak were included in the interview session. The results of this study show that the challenges faced by teachers in practicing the multicultural competency are lack of experience toward cultural diversity. A late exposure to cultural diversity makes it difficult for teachers to accept and adapt in a multi-ethnic school environment. The approaches suggested by school leaders to improve the multicultural competency are as follows: (1) Courses on cultural diversity should be organized to enhance the knowledge about cultural diversity; (2) the development of more open and better policy for education system in Malaysia in order to prepare teachers with a higher multicultural competency for teaching students from diverse ethnic and cultural groups; (3) an early exposure to cultural diversity in order to increase the multicultural competency, especially during teaching practicum.     

Curriculum Reform,with Particular Reference to Primary Literacy,in Contemporary English and Norwegian Official Documents

This paper explores similarities and differences in recent curriculum reform in England and Norway, focusing particularly on literacy. The main database consists of the official curriculum policy texts produced in both countries. Literacy is the major focus of the paper and a critical account is offered of current literacy policy in both countries by comparing the perspectives, values, and assumptions built into official texts. The paper begins by explaining and comparing the format of the reformed curricula in England and Norway, and by pointing to the impetus for change in both cases. It then goes on to analyse the various conceptions of literacy underpinning official literacy curriculum with reference to functional literacy, cultural literacy and critical literacy. It demonstrates how curriculum policy, and, more specifically, literacy policy is used as a vehicle for social control and reproduction and it concludes that differences in the nature of official policy in both countries can be explained with reference to the origin and impetus for change in the first place, and the extent to which the voice of the education establishment was heeded or silenced.

     

The “diseased” activist's body as the site of trauma: Anti-racist struggles and the postrace academy

This paper is an autoethnographic account of the “racialized activist body” in the White academy and in tandem the bio-politics and bio-ethics of its right to be an affective body or to possess its senses against the trauma of anti-racist struggles in higher education institutions. The paper argues that in the postrace university, the “activist body” birthed through trauma becomes a conduit for the pain of others enacting it as a site for the deposition and transmutation of trauma in the quest for racial and social justice. It employs Bracha Ettinger’s notion of “matrixial borderspace” to examine the interplay of social relations between of the activist body and other traumatized subjects in the provision of care as an activist. Two narratives unfold in the paper fusing the articulations of the main text with the paratext to unleash the tumultuous psyche of the activist and her journey of voicing resistance in her anti-racist struggles. In the process, the activist body emerges as a “diseased site,” overloaded with the trauma of others, yet numbed in its inability to reconnect with its own corporeality and professional identity in its interface with White governmentality. The paper asserts that anti-racist struggles reassemble the activist body, tightly welding it with exhaustion which manifests in the pervasiveness of racial battle fatigue in the ivory tower.     

Securitized citizens: Islamophobia,racism and the 7/7 London bombings

The London bombings of 7 July 2005 were a major event shaping the relationship between Muslims and non‐Muslims in Britain. In this paper we introduce the idea of ‘securitized citizens’ to analyse the changing relationship between British Muslims and wider British society in response to this and similar events. Through an analysis of qualitative interviews with Muslims and non‐Muslims of a variety of ethnic backgrounds in the areas where the London bombers lived in West Yorkshire we examine the popular perceptions of non‐Muslims and Muslims’ experiences. We show how processes of securitization and racialization have interacted with Islamophobic discourses and identifications, as well as the experiences of Muslims in West Yorkshire after the attacks.     

Academic “Centres,” Epistemic Differences and Brain Circulation

This article investigates the factors that shape how migrant academics engage with fellow scholars within their countries of origin. We focus specifically on the mobility of Asian‐born faculty between Singapore, a fast‐developing education hub in Southeast Asia, and their “home” countries within the region. Based on qualitative interviews with 45 migrant academics, this article argues that while education hubs like Singapore increase the possibility of brain circulation within Asia, epistemic differences between migrant academics and home country counterparts make it difficult to establish long‐term collaboration for research. Singapore institutions also look to the West in determining how research work is assessed for tenure and promotion, encouraging Singapore‐based academics to focus on networking with colleagues and peers based in the US and Europe rather than those based in origin countries. Such conditions undermine the positive impact of academic mobility between Singapore and surrounding countries within the region.     

Ethnic monitoring in higher education: Some reflections on methodology

Ethnic Monitoring in higher education has been limited and piecemeal. It often fails to explore the relationships between ethnicity and student progress and achievement, and to account for any ethnic inequalities revealed. In this paper an approach to ethnic monitoring that utilizes quantitative and qualitative methods is discussed. We argue that such an approach gives a clear statistical picture of group progress and achievement, identifies social, economic and institutional factors that might account for ethnic inequalities, and highlights the processes of racism and discrimination in higher education. All of these aspects are vital to a thorough understanding of ethnic inequalities in the higher education sector in the United Kingdom.     

COVID‐19: A threat to educated Muslim women's negotiated identity in Pakistan

This study attempts to explore how the lockdown/containment measures taken by the government during the COVID‐19 pandemic have threatened educated Muslim women's negotiated identity regarding wifehood and motherhood in urban Pakistan and how they struggle to reposition to reconstruct it. Through semi‐structured interviews, making an in‐depth comparative study of three differently situated cases (Muslim women), this study argues that the abnormal situation that has ensued from the pandemic has reinforced the vulnerability of women's nascent negotiated identity by landing them in a space where they are supposed by the normative structures to step back to carrying out their traditional responsibilities as ‘good’ wife and mother during the crisis. It has found that the pandemic has similarity in its impacts for the women in their familial lives, despite their being variously situated and resistive, due to the general religio‐culturally defined patriarchal social behaviour of the place (Pakistan) toward women and lack of action on the part of the state for implementing its laws of women's empowerment.