Islamophobia and Education

Author(s):  
Rahat Zaidi

Islamophobia is a term used to describe society’s phobic reaction to a certain religious or ideological group. Historically, the coined word Islamophobia has been manipulated into various constructs, which pose a microcosm-macrocosm challenge for educators over whether or not the education system can act as a platform for better understanding what is currently transpiring in the world. It is in the classroom that educators and students can grapple with the sociophobic situation and pull apart the two sides of Islam and phobia. In the classroom there are learning opportunities that can foster critical new understandings about why social phobias exist and challenge, through an antiphobic curriculum, the fear and indifference of otherness. New and higher levels of immigration in the Western world, rising tensions in non-Muslim populations, and the baggage of history have brought us to a critical turning point. Educators can respond positively and constructively to this challenge and opportunity and help to steer the course. Although Islamophobia is present in many countries worldwide, assimilationist policies vary from country to country. Nonetheless, individual countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Australia, and in those in Western Europe, have their own takes on Islamophobia. Since 9/11 there has been significant agreement among scholars that societal changes can be constructed through the systematic employment of specific curricular initiatives. These initiatives call into question the traditional trajectory of how the sentiments of Islamophobia can be successfully countered in the classroom to reduce sociophobic tensions and increase cultural and linguistic awareness. This can happen through culturally sustaining pedagogy, whose primary objective is to embrace literate, linguistic, and cultural pluralism in the school system. Education has tremendous power to challenge phobic perspectives and move beyond the traditional realm of what has historically been the norm in the classroom.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Turchin ◽  
Andrey Korotayev

This article revisits the prediction, made in 2010, that the 2010–2020 decade would likely be a period of growing instability in the United States and Western Europe (Turchin 2010). This prediction was based on a computational model that quantified in the USA such structural-demographic forces for instability as popular immiseration, intraelite competition, and state weakness prior to 2010. Using these trends as inputs, the model calculated and projected forward in time the Political Stress Index, which in the past was strongly correlated with socio-political instability. Ortmans et al. (2017) conducted a similar structural-demographic study for the United Kingdom and obtained similar results. Here we use the Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive for the US, UK, and Western European countries to assess these structural-demographic predictions. We find that such measures of socio-political instability as anti-government demonstrations and riots increased dramatically during the 2010–2020 decade in all of these countries.


Author(s):  
Catherine Hoad

This chapter uses critical discourse analysis and textual analysis to offer a general overview of metal as a multi-sited, multi-modal genre. While acknowledging the centrality of metal’s ostensible “birth” in the United Kingdom, and rapid spread to the United States and Western Europe, to the genre’s identity, this chapter also discusses metal’s positionality in discrete studies from Northern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. In examining how metal is experienced in these contexts, this chapter thus seeks to problematize the discourse of metal’s “true” birth in the Anglosphere, and elucidate a critique of the scholarly literature of the “global metal” model, which has permeated metal music studies over the last decade. Such a model, as the author concludes in this chapter, potentially replicates many of the problems—Othering, exclusive, non-agentic—with “world music” as a discourse, and thus it is necessary to assert the ways in which scholars and scene members alike are speaking back to these characterizations.


2012 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricio Sáiz ◽  
Paloma Fernández Pérez

Trademarks have traditionally been viewed as assets that, although intangible, nevertheless contribute to the success of firms. This study, based on a compilation of national trademark data, corrects existing distortions of the historical role of brands and their—often unsuccessful—use as business tools by countries, sectors, or firms. Legislation on, and the profuse use of, trademarks in the Western world was pioneered by Spain, rather than by France, the United States, or the United Kingdom, and was initiated in unusual sectors, such as papermaking and textiles, rather than in the more usual ones of food and beverages. Analysis of the applicants of Catalan trademarks, across sectors, during almost a century, reveals that the legal possession of a brand cannot in itself guarantee a firm's success.


1985 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 169-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Newton

Most commentators on the 1949 sterling crisis have viewed it as an episode with implications merely for the management of the British economy. This paper, based on the public records now available, discusses the impact of the crisis on British economic foreign policy. In particular it suggests that the crisis revealed deep Anglo-American differences, centring on the nature of the Marshall Plan, on the international value of the sterling area, and on the proper relationship between the United Kingdom and Western Europe, Ultimately the British succeeded in resolving these disagreements: but this triumph ironically implied both the defeat of British aims in post-war European reconstruction and a long term delusion that great power status could be maintained on the basis of a special relationship-with the United States.


2019 ◽  
pp. 176-185
Author(s):  
Nadiia Koloshuk

Reflections of the outstanding scholar-Slavicist Yuriy Shevelov about his paradoxical experience of ethnic- identification, on the background of this problem as a general human and fundamental one, have a lot of weight. The escape of a young Ukrainian scientist from occupied Kharkiv to the West was driven by conscious aspirations to self-fulfillment and freedom. The path from Ukraine to Europe, and later to America, saved him from war and physical destruction, which threatened not only him but also a significant part of his people. Thinking of this path as salvation, he soberly and quite tolerably showed the environment of the Ukrainian and foreign intellectuals. He was a close acquaintance with them in pre- war and occupied Kharkiv and Lviv, in the German DP camps for Ukrainian refugees, in the research centers of Western Europe, and later in the United States. Openness and sincerity, as well as the scale of experience and depiction, the depth and self-criticism of comprehension of his own experience, make the book of Yu. Shevelov particularly valuable in the Ukrainian culture of the twentieth century. Yu. Shevelov rightly considered the reason for a special hatred on the part of representatives of the “Russian world” (in particular, in the face of the Russian emigrant Roman Jakobson and Ukrainian traitor Ivan Bilodid) their desire to destroy in his person a representative of an independent Ukrainian culture, a qualified researcher of its history and language, capable of advancing and advocating scientific ideas, those contradicted their Russification desires, which formed in the minds of the representatives of the scientific community of the western world non-penetrating barriers to the penetration of the voice of the stateless Ukrainian ethnic group. He called a complete defeat the result of his confrontation with the “Russian world” in the western scientific world. However, based on the fact that his labor is now in demand, and those who want to affirm the “Russian world” in the West and in Ukraine were already diminished, we can assert: his efforts have not gone in vain. Identification is that complex of ideas, which is made up in human heads, and here the truth goes up over the lie.


1952 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-142

Responding to an invitation issued in May 1951, fourteen members of the Congress of the United States met in Strasbourg on November 20, 1951 in a special session with twenty members of the Council of Europe. The United States delegation included Senators Benton, Green, Henrickson, Hickenlooper, Humphrey, McMahon and Wiley and Representatives Cox, Ellsworth, Judd, Keating, O'Toole, Reams and Smith. Council representatives were Mssrs. Spaak (Belgium), Brentano (Germany), Boothby (United Kingdom), Crosbie (Ireland), Gerstenmaier (Germany), Glenvil-Hall (United Kingdom), Jacini (Italy), Kieft (Netherlands), Mercouris (Greece), de Menthon (France), Moe (Norway), Mollet (France), Ohlin (Sweden), Parri (Italy), Reynaud (France), Schmid (Germany), Treves (Italy), Urguplu (Turkey), de VallePoussin (Belgium), and Lord Layton (United Kingdom). The session was to discuss “the European Union, its problems, progress, prospects, and place in the Western world”; specifically the agenda included: 1) the economic aspects of rearmament; 2) the political aspects of European defense; 3) the dollar gap and trade between eastern and western Europe; and 4) the problem of refugees and emigration.


1978 ◽  
Vol 84 ◽  
pp. 35-56

The growth of output in the industrial countries continues to lag behind their oflicial targets and our own expectations (see the appendix). More complete data confirm our February estimate that aggregate production in the OECD area increased by only about 3½ per cent in 1977, leaving unemployment higher at the end of the year than at the beginning in all major countries other than the United States. Even allowing for measures of fiscal stimulation in most of the major countries we do not expect much change in either 1978 or 1979. Growth should be rather faster in Western Europe (particularly this year in the United Kingdom and next year in France, Italy and some of the smaller countries), but we expect these accelerations to be roughly balanced by progressively smaller increases in output in the United States.


1967 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 14-25

The growth of world industrial production slowed down in the fourth quarter of last year and in spite of relatively mild weather in Western Europe there must have been an actual fall in the first quarter of 1967. The change of trend has been most marked in West Germany, but also has affected a number of other countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom.


2020 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 349-351
Author(s):  
Bruno Duarte ◽  
Ana Rodrigues ◽  
Cândida Fernandes

Syphilis is an old disease and a major public health concern, which is re-emerging in the western world. Atypical syphi- litic presentations can be challenging to diagnose. We present a 23-year-old, HIV-positive man who has sex with men who presented with a 2-week history of an asymptomatic lesion on the glans. Previous topical and systemic treatments proved unsuccessful. Physical examination demonstrated a slightly indurated, ill-defined erythematous plaque over most of the glans. Enlarged, non-tender, bilateral inguinal lymph nodes were palpable. Serological tests revealed a fourfold increase in the VDRL titre (1:8, previously 1:2). A diagnosis of syphilitic balanitis of Follmann was made and complete resolution was achieved with an intramuscular single dose of benzathine penicillin 2.4 MU. Syphilitic balanitis of Follmann represents an uncommon manifestation of primary syphilis, with less than 100 cases reported. Untrea- ted, it will resolve spontaneously, but the patient will remain highly infectious and at-risk for long-term morbidity. In an era in which the number of syphilis cases is increasing sharply both in Western Europe and the United States, all physicians should be aware for the typical and atypical early syphilitic manifestations as they represent opportunities of paramount importance for treatment and epide- mic control.


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