Women's rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran: the contribution of secular-oriented feminism

A cornerstone of the conservative gender ideology of Iran’s clerical eliteis the conviction that biological differences between men and women arecause for them to have different roles and functions in society. Differentroles and functions translate to different (read unequal) legal rights.Notwithstanding the discriminatory gender policies of the state, Iranianwomen have refused to renege on their claims to equal rights. In the faceof intense political pressure to withdraw from the public arena, women inthe Islamic Republic have maintained a foothold in the political, socialand legal realms.

Eliza Hamilton Dunlop's 'the aboriginal mother': romanticism, anti slavery and imperial feminism in the nineteenth century

This paper positions the work of colonial poet Eliza Hamilton Dunlop amongst international Romantic poetry of the period, and argues that Dunlop’s poetry reflects a transposition of Romantic women’s poetry to Australia. Dunlop’s poetry, such as ‘The Aboriginal Mother’, demonstrates the relationship of Romantic women’s poetry to early feminism and Social Reform. As with the work of Felicia Hemans, Dunlop was interested in the role of women, and the ‘domestic’ as they related to broader national and political concerns. Dunlop seems to have been consciously applying the tropes, such as that of the mother, of anti slavery poetry found within American, British, and international poetic traditions to the Australian aboriginal context. Themes of indigenous motherhood, and also of Sati or widow burning in India, and human rights had been favored by early women’s rights campaigners in Britain from the 1820s, focusing on abolition of slavery through the identification of white women with the Negro mother. Dunlop’s comparative sympathy for the situation of aboriginals in Australia has been given critical attention as the aspect which makes her work valuable. However, in this essay I hope to outline how Dunlop’s poetry fits in to the international context of the engagement of Romantic women poets with Western Imperialist models and colonial Others.

Education about religions and worldviews: promoting intercultural and interreligious understanding in secular societies

This volume presents the findings of a number of empirical and theoretical studies on education about religions and worldviews (ERW) conducted in the Western societies of Britain, Ireland, Canada, Norway, Finland, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. Educational programmes about diverse religions and worldviews began to be investigated and implemented as strategies to encourage interreligious understanding and social cohesion, particularly following the 2005 London bombings when a fear of youth radicalisation and home-grown terrorism became prevalent. In addition, as a growing number of people in Western societies, and young people especially, declare themselves to have no religious affiliation, state actors are currently grappling with the reality that we are living in increasingly multifaith and non-religious societies and government education systems have become places of contestation as a result of these changes. This volume examines ERW research and policies in a number of diverse places in the hope of identifying common themes, overlapping insights and best practices that can inform research and policy for religious literacy and interreligious understanding in other contexts. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies.