Islamophobia in the media: a response from multicultural education 1

This paper looks at the media in Germany and Australia in order to focus on the question of how Islam is accepted in both countries, and the extent to which Islamophobia exists. It was discovered that, for the most part, the media in both countries present a somewhat biased view of Muslims and Islam. However, there were some significant differences: (1) a higher acceptance of multiculturalism in the Australian media, which is revealed in the greater number of articles on ordinary, everyday multicultural life; (2) differences in the portrayal of migrants’ roles; and (3) the terminology used to refer to migrants. The paper concludes by outlining the ways in which multicultural education could contribute to a reduction of Islamophobia.     

Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression

Historical in scope, trenchant in tone, Feagin's latest contributionto the literature on racism sets out to develop a sociologicaltheory of oppression through which racial-ethnic relationshipsand events in the USA can be interpreted. Feagin's primary focusis the subjugation of African Americans from the slavery erato the present. His theory argues that white-on-black racismwas one of the principal bedrocks upon which the USA was founded,engendering an archetypal system of white privilege that hasbeen sustained to this day and that manifests itself in everymajor societal institution. The centrality of white-on-blackoppression to his conceptualization     

Benthamism in the Countryside: The Architecture of Rural Space, 1900–1930

Historians of state formation have increasingly recognized what Foucault has described as the 'dark side' of the enlightenment institutional principles of representation, transparency and accountability and explored the parallel principles of legitimation, surveillance and discipline. In this paper, I pursue these themes in a neglected area, the institutional architecture of rural space. I do so by examining ideologies for rural planning in western Canada and the American midwest in the early twentieth century. These ideologies were linked to state projects, and found institutional expression in Canada in the 'town planning movement' attached to municipal and provincial planning offices, and in the United States in agricultural extension services and the 'county agent' system—the local 'inspectorate' of the Federal Department of Agriculture. The aim was a restructuring of rural space in the interests of rationalizing agricultural production and controlling large populations of settlers, recently displaced, and disturbingly 'isolated' and inaccessible in the vast spaces of the great plains. Despite common aims, American and Canadian reformers adopted fundamentally different principles of spatial design. Town planners inherited the European assumption that community networks and class relations were embedded in particular spatial arrangements, so that rural reform required re-drawing the boundaries of fields and settlements. As early as 1915, American reformers developed the idea that networks of sociability and domination were defined first by abstract structures, formal organizations and the cash nexus, and could, using modern media of communication, be 'disembedded' from particular locales and distributed spatially.     

Speculation in Standard Auctions with Resale

In standard auctions resale creates a role for a speculator—a bidder who is commonly known to have no use value for the good on sale. We study this issue in environments with symmetric independent private‐value bidders. For second‐price and English auctions the efficient value‐bidding equilibrium coexists with a continuum of inefficient equilibria in which the speculator wins the auction and makes positive profits. First‐price and Dutch auctions have an essentially unique equilibrium, and whether or not the speculator wins the auction and distorts the final allocation depends on the number of bidders, the value distribution, and the discount factor. Speculators do not make profits in first‐price or Dutch auctions.     

Modernism and the Machine Farmer

In this paper I apply recent theoretical discussions of the spatial character of modernity to a 'rural' context. I argue that neither modernity nor 'modernism' has been an exclusively 'urban' phenomenon in the twentieth century, and that attention to modernism in the countryside yields insights into the modernist project. From the beginning of the twentieth century, the apparently 'rural' spaces of the prairie west were already integrated into modern trans-local structures. Wheat farmers were ahead of their contemporaries in their appreciation of the nature and scale of modern distanciated relationships. They were 'modernist' in embracing and celebrating the technologies, particularly organizational technologies, for dominating space and time. They were also innovators in modern organizational design, seeking creatively to control the modern "machine" and to bridge the local and the 'global.' Their progressive experimentation culminated in a surprising proposal for 'co-operative farms' not unlike Soviet collective farms.