Identity politics, justice and the schooling of Muslim girls: navigating the tensions between multiculturalism, group rights and feminism

This article focuses on the concerns expressed by three female Muslim educators who are support staff at an English comprehensive school. Consistent with the debates associated with multiculturalism, group rights and feminism, the article illuminates spaces of gender constraint and possibility within the discourses shaping these women’s lives and the lives of the Muslim girls they educate. With reference to an initiative at the school designed to support these girls’ greater self-determination – an Islamic discussion group – the article highlights the significance of a justice politics that begins with overcoming relations of status subordination rather than on differentiated group identity.

Some of these girls can be real drama queens : issues of gender, sexual harassment and schooling

Since the 1970s many feminists working for gender justice in education have highlighted the predominance and seriousness of sexual harassment in schools and condemned the enduring trivialization of such behaviours. This paper develops this body of work by focusing on how issues of sexual harassment are located within prevailing contemporary western educational contexts that position boys as 'victims' of feminism and 'girl-friendly' schooling. It is argued here that such contexts draw attention away from the powerful spaces that many boys continue to inhabit in schools. Counter to the popular notion that girls no longer face problems in relation to their schooling, the paper foregrounds the voices of four (14-year-old) Grade Eight girls from Tasmania, Australia who detail their disturbing experiences of sexual harassment. Pointing to the grave inadequacies of common remedies used to address these behaviours, such as prescriptive discipline systems that ignore issues of gender and power and boy-friendly remedies that collude in the perpetuation of inequitable gender relations, the paper highlights the imperative of disrupting the erasure of these issues from current dominant equity debates and the urgency of better addressing this problem in schools. Along these lines, the paper calls for teacher practice that acts against the grain of broader anti-feminist and performative school cultures to transform the masculinities of entitlement that contribute to these unacceptable behaviours.

Feminist struggles to mobilise progressive spaces within the ‘boy-turn’ in gender equity and schooling reform

This article presents the stories of two Australian feminist educators, ‘Kath’ and ‘Kim’. Drawn from a small‐scale interview‐based study, the stories highlight these women’s struggles to mobilise progressive spaces within the current boy‐focused equity and schooling agenda. Such struggles are located within the new possibilities for feminist intervention enabled by current educational trends in Australia. The stories focus on Kath and Kim’s experiences leading the professional development of teachers from several schools in Queensland (Australia) as part of the $19.4 million national initiative, Success for Boys. The article draws on feminist understandings of ‘progressive’ spaces and highlights the requisite conditions necessary for mobilising such spaces. In particular, Kath and Kim’s stories bring to light the powerful role emotions continue to play in both enabling and constraining gender reform and the continued significance of attending to, and working with, such emotions to enhance the pursuit of gender justice in schools.

National gender equity and schooling policy in Australia: struggles for a non-identitarian feminist politics

This paper tracks the development of gender equity and schooling policy in Australia from theNational Policy on the Education of Girls in 1987, to current policy concerns with boys’ educational underperformance. The paper’s key focus is on the ways in which feminist informed equity policy has been undermined by broader imperatives of economic rationalism and anti-feminist discourses. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s understandings of distributive and cultural gender justice and her notion of a nonidentitarian feminist politics, the paper critically examines the ways in which such imperatives have re-articulated equity and schooling concerns. Through these lenses, the limitations of the affirmative gender binary politics and remedies that have dominated gender and schooling reform in Australia are highlighted. The paper concludes with an illumination of the gender justice spaces currently being mobilised in Australian schools. Such spaces, it is argued, fostered within a context of increasing autonomy and self-management for schools, are providing avenues for creative and disruptive (pro)feminist activism.

‘Some of those girls can be real drama queens’: issues of gender, sexual harassment and schooling

Since the 1970s many feminists working for gender justice in education have highlighted the predominance and seriousness of sexual harassment in schools and condemned the enduring trivialization of such behaviours. This paper develops this body of work by focusing on how issues of sexual harassment are located within prevailing contemporary western educational contexts that position boys as ‘victims’ of feminism and ‘girl‐friendly’ schooling. It is argued here that such contexts draw attention away from the powerful spaces that many boys continue to inhabit in schools. Counter to the popular notion that girls no longer face problems in relation to their schooling, the paper foregrounds the voices of four (14‐year‐old) Grade Eight girls from Tasmania, Australia who detail their disturbing experiences of sexual harassment. Pointing to the grave inadequacies of common remedies used to address these behaviours, such as prescriptive discipline systems that ignore issues of gender and power and boy‐friendly remedies that collude in the perpetuation of inequitable gender relations, the paper highlights the imperative of disrupting the erasure of these issues from current dominant equity debates and the urgency of better addressing this problem in schools. Along these lines, the paper calls for teacher practice that acts against the grain of broader anti‐feminist and performative school cultures to transform the masculinities of entitlement that contribute to these unacceptable behaviours.

Eco mafia and environmental crime

This chapter explores the links between organised crime and the environment, and examines the regulatory and environmentalist responses to this growing issue of global concern.

Construction of womanhood in the bengali language of Bangladesh

The subject-matter of this essay is gender justice in language which, as I argue, may be achieved through the development of a gender-related approach to linguistic human rights. The last decades of the 20th century, globally marked by a “gender shift” in attitudes to language policy, gave impetus to the social movement for promoting linguistic gender equality. It was initiated in Western Europe and nowadays is moving eastwards, as ideas of gender democracy progress into developing countries. But, while in western societies gender discrimination through language, or linguistic sexism, was an issue of concern for over three decades, in developing countries efforts to promote gender justice in language are only in their infancy. My argument is that to promote gender justice in language internationally it is necessary to acknowledge the rights of women and men to equal representation of their gender in language and speech and, therefore, raise a question of linguistic rights of the sexes. My understanding is that the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights in 1996 provided this opportunity to address the problem of gender justice in language as a human rights issue, specifically as a gender dimension of linguistic human rights.

La situación de los refugiados palestinos en el Líbano a partir del Acuerdo de Taif en la década de los 90.

El interés de esta monografía es analizar la situación en la que viven los refugiados palestinos en el Líbano a partir de las políticas impuestas por el gobierno desde la década de los 90. Se analiza y explica cómo un Estado con el fin de defender su seguridad nacional se convierte en una fuente de amenazas para la seguridad humana de ciertos individuos. A través de la perspectiva de Barry Buzan se busca explicar el proceso de securitización por medio del cual los refugiados palestinos son vistos como una amenaza existencial para la seguridad nacional libanesa.

Los números cuentan. Sub-representación de la obra artística de mujeres creadoras en museos y centros de arte contemporáneos

Este artículo cuantifica la presencia de obra artística de mujeres artistas en 21 museos y centros de arte contemporáneo españoles. Los resultados constatan una nítida sub-representación de la obra exhibida, por debajo del 20 por ciento. ¿Por qué sucede esto?, ¿diferencial potencial artístico de mujeres y hombres?, ¿superioridad masculina?, ¿discriminación? o ¿un sistema de arte con sesgo androcéntrico? En estas páginas se discute sobre la presencia de varios factores para explicar la brecha de género y se reclama, de las administraciones públicas y las instituciones de gestión cultural, el cumplimiento de la Ley para la Igualdad para garantizar la paridad.

Religion, sustainable development and policy: principles to practice

The nexus between religion and development is now well recognized in scholarship but the implications for development policies are relatively unexplored. The challenge with analysing religion as a policy construct is to ensure that its rich anthropological dimensions are not lost, but rather that these inform the conception and implementation of development planning, especially in diverse, multireligious societies. The aim of this special issue is to unpack the complex anthropological, sociological and even theological dimensions of religion that can enable development policymakers to identify the ways in which religion shapes the society, the environment and the economy. Therein also lie the opportunities to articulate policies that are truly responsive to serious structural issues of inequalities and oppressions. The authors address five foci that are central to sustainable development policymaking – urbanization and spatial equality; gender justice; environment and human/animal tensions; economic growth; and postsecularity and governance.

Giving Muslim girls ‘a voice’: the possibilities and limits to challenging patriarchal interpretations of Islam in one English community

This paper presents the philosophies and practices of ‘Laura’, a young English community liaison worker and former religious studies teacher who has recently converted to Islam. Drawing on data generated from a qualitative and predominantly interview‐based research project that investigated issues of pedagogy and social justice in English schools, the focus is on Laura’s efforts to support Muslim girls through an Islamic discussion group. The paper highlights how Laura draws on Islamic beliefs to support the girls’ questioning of patriarchal interpretations of Islam within their Pakistani immigrant community. The paper also provides insight, however, into some of the tensions and limitations of Laura’s liberatory approach in terms of her positioning as white, western, and middle‐class. Against this backdrop, a self‐reflexive approach that is sensitive to how ‘ethnic‐specific sociability’ shapes understandings and enactments of gender is advocated. Such an approach is presented as central in considering how spaces of gender justice might be mobilised within community environments where unprecedented levels of multi‐cultural fragmentation and diversity have amplified tensions and conflict between and amongst racial and religious groups.

Struggles to subvert the gendered field: issues of masculinity, rurality and class

This article explores the complex struggles associated with intersections of class, rurality and masculinity, and the ways in which such intersections work to preserve a gendered status quo within and beyond school communities in Australia. Drawing on the stories of Monica and Phoebe, two teachers who understand schooling as a site of contestation, resistance and possibility for gender justice, the article draws on the theoretical constructs of Bourdieu to make visible the struggles for power arising from the gendered distribution of capital in schools located in low socio‐economic rural communities. In making sense of these struggles, we identify strategies of conservation that seek to reinscribe gender inequities and preserve the field and the taken‐for‐granted understandings of females and femininity as subordinate to males and masculinity within it. We also identify pedagogies of subversion employed by Phoebe and Monica and highlight the potential of these practices to disrupt the field in ways that seek to broaden and transform the gendered habitus of students.