1,720,967 research outputs found
Introduction: beyond public reason
Get PDFThis introduction situates the special issue within longstanding debates on liberal public reason, tracing its Enlightenment roots through Habermas and Rawls to contemporary political dilemmas. It highlights how anthropology has revealed the exclusions embedded in public reason’s universalist claims, particularly for those marginalized by culture, race, gender, class, or religion. We argue that liberal public reason has become both a hegemonic philosophy and a globalized pedagogical tool of governance, yet its assumptions about rationality, abstraction, and secularism often obscure or delegitimize alternative modes of political communication and ethical life. This introduction outlines how the essays collected here explore immanent social projects that do not merely critique liberalism from its margins but enact alternative public reasoning grounded in vernacular, embodied, and relational practices. These projects arise both within and beyond liberal institutions, offering political horizons not overdetermined by liberal assumptions. The authors advocate moving beyond frameworks that juxtapose liberalism with its ‘illiberal’ others, emphasizing anthropology’s potential to illuminate diverse forms of public deliberation that exceed these binaries. Finally, the introduction argues that by attending ethnographically to these alternative practices, from community organizing to legal reasoning, from embodied solidarity to spiritual claims, we can rethink public reason as plural, situated, and capable of addressing deep difference without demanding assimilation to liberal norms
What Schooling Engenders: Reflections from Arab States, Muslim Societies and Beyond
Get PDFBook review on: Osama Abi-Mershed (Ed.). Trajectories of Education in the Arab World: Legacies and Challenges. Routledge. 2010. Sakurai Keiko and Fariba Adelkhah (Eds.). The Moral Economy of the Madrasa: Islam and Education Today. Routledge. 2011
In two speeds (a deux vitesses): linguistic pluralism and educational anxiety in contemporary Morocco
No full textNotwithstanding its promotion as a vehicle for the decolonization and modernization of knowledge in Morocco, the policy of Arabization has been caught in an ongoing competition with the pedagogical visions of the French Protectorate-visions that have been recycled by nationalist and international development agendas. This competition has subtly classified the sciences and the humanities into Francophone and Arabophone disciplines, respectively, at a moment when national development is understood as technological advancement. School participants endure this linguistic, disciplinary, and, effectively, social hierarchy and put their awareness of the system at the service of its circumvention. The anxiety of teachers over the future of state-educated youth indicates that the legitimacy of the school itself has become highly doubted. This article approaches both the public school and its relationship to knowledge through a historically informed ethnographic lens, arguing that centralized theories of pedagogy, the sociological category of class, and the assumed dichotomy between state agendas and international patronage are unsatisfactory frames for the interpretation of the phenomena in question.</p
Learning in Morocco:Language politics and the abandoned educational dream
No full textLearning in Morocco offers a rare look inside public education in the Middle East. While policymakers see a crisis in education based on demographics and financing, Moroccan high school students point to the effects of a highly politicized Arabization policy that has never been implemented coherently. In recent years, national policies to promote the use of Arabic have come into conflict with the demands of a neoliberal job market in which competence in French is still a prerequisite for advancement. Based on long-term research inside and outside classrooms, Charis Boutieri describes how students and teachers work within, or try to circumvent, the system, whose contradictory demands ultimately lead to disengagement and, on occasion, to students taking to the streets in protest.</p
Beyond words:non-dialogical public reason in (post) revolutionary Tunisia
Get PDFIn the widely demonized municipality of Ettadhamun, the heavy hand of Zin al Abidine Ben Ali's police state was partly lifted in 2011 and replaced by the softer touch of aid promoting international democracy. This aid architecture supported the burgeoning civil society to train Ettadhamun residents in the skill of ‘interpersonal communication’ (tawasul bayna al-afrad) for the purpose of managing social conflict. Yet the members of the only non-religious association in the neighbourhood of Nogra reject the liberal recommendations of their trainers and carve out a tense neighbourhood co-presence without dialogue with their Salafist neighbours. Counter-intuitively to deliberative theories of democracy, I suggest that in this non-dialogical co-presence inheres a public sphere with social and political possibilities. Neighbourhood residents trade liberal argumentation for dwelling together beyond words, which does not attempt to reform one another and engenders solidarity. The suspension of dialogue reflects a minoritarian articulation of the aftermath of the 2011 revolution as ‘the reconstitutive phase of the political’. This articulation refuses the curated narrative of the postcolonial Tunisian nation and pries open the teleology of liberal democratic transition.</p
Events of citizenship:Left militantism and the returns of revolution in Tunisia
No full textAmidst an ostensibly successful transition along the axes of liberal parliamentary democracy since the 2011 revolution, a group of Tunisian left militants organize their own spaces of deliberation and ethical cultivation. Among these is the ciné-club, an assembly that combines film screenings and discussion. By unearthing the diverse chronotopes–temporal and spatial dimensions–of Tunisian revolutionary thought and praxis, the ciné-club assembly disrupts hegemonic understandings of liberal citizenship. By virtue of this disruption, the assembly constitutes an ‘event of citizenship’ that exposes not only the long legacy of protest in Tunisia, but also the diverse understandings of revolution and democracy among the Tunisian citizenry today. The returns of local and global revolutions in the Tunisian present offer us the opportunity to delve into the intricacies of the social life of left political thought and praxis.</p
Inheritance, Heritage, and the Disinherited: Ambiguities of Religious Pedagogy in the Moroccan Public School
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