Women in higher education leadership in South Asia: rejection, refusal, reluctance, revisioning

This research, linked to the South Asia Global Education Dialogue series, looks at the role of women in South Asia in respect to higher education and leadership. The research sought out existing knowledge and baseline data from the literature, policies, change interventions, available statistics and interviews across six countries in South Asia (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka). From this research, recommendations about what specific future actions and interventions for change could be implemented in South Asia have been made

Jordan’s primary curriculum and its propensity for student-centred teaching and learning

This article examines the Jordanian lower-primary national curriculum and its propensity for student-centred teaching and learning. It draws upon Basil Bernstein’s sociological theory of pedagogic codes to analyse the curriculum model and the advocated pedagogical approach within official curriculum documents, textbooks and teacher guides. Although the research conducted confirms the aspirations of the national curriculum for the adoption of student-centred pedagogies, analysis of the selected texts reveals mixed messages where in some areas the curriculum exemplifies an integrated code and in others a collection code. The messages about classroom framing are also found to be contradictory. The paper argues that if Jordan is to fulfil its stated aspirations to embrace more progressive pedagogies, a full review of the curriculum is needed to ensure its classification and framing cohere better with a student-centred approach

Silencing youth sexuality in Senegal: intersections of medicine and morality

This article reports on recent research funded by international development actors which explored how Senegalese youth acted as ‘active citizens’ and claimed their education and sexual and reproductive health (SRH) rights. Our analysis is framed by a review of contemporary international development discourses that seem to offer fertile possibilities for more plural understandings of sexuality. After describing the research methodology and methods, we draw on post-structural theory to analyse the discourses youth deployed to talk about sex and their sexualities. Rather than a source of pleasure, youth’s talk of sex and sexuality was dominated by discourses of morality and medicine, in ways that sustained a heteronormative gender regime permeated by entrenched hegemonic masculinities. We conclude that rather than the fertile possibilities identified in our opening review, the SRH lens re-inscribed a negative framing of sexuality which was compounded by both family and religious norms

Beyond the modern: Muslim youth imaginaries of nation in Northern Nigeria

The rise of different nationalisms in an increasingly unequal and neoliberal world make predictions about the dawn of a post-national, global society seem both incongruous and fraught with Eurocentric occlusions. In response, we present a postcolonial analysis of research into Muslim youth narratives of nation in Northern Nigeria. This highlights the continued significance of nation for youth as well as the historical fractures - both internal and external - that infused their identity narratives. We further show the entanglement of nation and religion in youth imaginaries, and their anti-colonial ambivalences, notably with respect to gender reforms. Our analysis calls for a sociology of nation that goes beyond a modern framing and instead attends to the agonistic affective relations through which national imaginaries are constructed; the historical sutures that were intrinsic to the creation of postcolonial nations and their enduring persistence as points of fracture

Muslim youth as global citizens

Dominant understandings of global or cosmopolitanism citizenship align it with the ‘modern’ and the ‘secular’, in ways that construct religious belongings as irrational, or indeed ‘pre-modern’. Assumptions of superiority embedded in claims to cosmopolitanism are all the more powerful for being constructed as a ‘universal’, in ways that erase and occlude the local social relations and particularities of the spaces and positions from which these very claims emanate. Resisting such understandings, this paper engages with research into Muslim youth identities with respect to nation, religion and gender in four nation-states of the Global South. It explores how Muslim youth’s strong affective commitments to the religious community of the ‘global Ummah’ can be understood as a distinctive form of global, cosmopolitan citizenship, in ways that are similar to, but also sharply differentiated from modern (secular) understandings of cosmopolitanism. We suggest that appeals to any ‘universal’ cosmopolitan project can work to silence local social relations (such as ethnic, gender, religious or class differentiations), and how all claims to cosmopolitanism are intrinsically sutured to youth’s struggles for positioning within their nation. We stress therefore the importance of attending to local social dynamics throughout our analysis of youth identity constructions and their constitutive others, and take this up throughout the following papers of this special edition

Introduction: pluralising Muslim youth identities: intersections of nation, religion and gender

The introductory paper to this special edition provides an overview of the multi-country research project on Muslim youth identities upon which all the papers draw. It includes outlines of its methodological and theoretical frameworks and its rationale. Using a case study approach, the research explored the identity narratives of Muslim youth in the four socio-political contexts of Pakistan, Senegal, Nigeria and Lebanon, each of which have distinctive post-colonial histories. In each context we explored how youth performed and constructed their identities with reference to intersecting discourses of nation, religion and gender. The data was collected with the support of local researchers through female and male focus group discussions which sought to privilege youth voices. Our analysis drew upon feminist, poststructural and postcolonial theorists (e.g. Butler, Foucault, Hall, Said), who understand identities to be constituted through difference. Taking up this theoretical stance, we highlight the axes of difference that were integral to youth identity formations, discussing these with reference to internal and external ‘others’. By attending to youth voices and their shifting discourses of allegiance and difference, the research provides a counter to the stigmatisation and misrepresentation of Muslim youth within much Western media. Our analyses emphasise the ways that youth identities are constructed within their particular socio-historical, postcolonial contexts and the contingencies of their local social relations, while also acknowledging the interpenetration of the global and the local. The introductory paper concludes with an overview of six articles which provide cross-case analyses that address key themes emerging from our data

National identities and the external other in Muslim majority contexts: youth narratives in Pakistan and Senegal

This paper focuses on youth’s constructions of their national identities in two contrasting Muslim-majority contexts – Senegal and Pakistan – with very different histories of nation-state formation and post-independence trajectories. Drawing on case study research, we take up the historical specificities of their respective state formations and emergence as independent nations from their colonial past. After describing our theoretical frameworks and research methodology, we present our analysis of the identity narratives of 65 Pakistani and 75 Senegalese youth. We show that youth in both contexts were proud of their democracies, although with different inflections in each context. Our analysis shows that youth’s national imaginaries were predominantly produced with reference to significant external others which had deep historical roots. In Pakistan, this involved the external other of India, an articulation that has been historically sedimented on religious grounds since their partition. In more contemporary times, youth imaginaries of religion and nation remained intertwined, being constructed together against external others associated with the ‘War on Terror’. Similarly, religion was central to the national imaginaries of Senegalese youth. Senegal’s Sufi leaders were constructed as national icons and particularly valorised for their peaceful resistance to the colonial ‘other’. Youth also valued Senegal’s syncretic forms of Islam, constructing this against ‘jihadist’ Islam that they associated with other African, Middle Eastern and South Asian nations. Finally, our analysis highlights how the salience of external others in youth narratives in our two case studies worked to diminish the significance of internal differences and make internal power hierarchies invisible

Decolonising formative assessment

Formative assessment is of critical concern within higher education, particularly as ‘feedback’ remains a recurring source of student dissatisfaction. In contemporary times, the need to decolonise higher education emerged first in post-colonial contexts of the global south, before becoming a more general debate in contexts which historically were at the heart of empire. Literatures on formative assessment and decolonisation have, however, remained discrete and disconnected. This chapter first makes the connection between decolonisation and assessment, highlighting the need to question dominant (modern) understandings of assessment as ‘objective’ measurement. It then suggests potentially helpful strands in assessment and wider literature to re-imagine formative assessment practices that might support decolonisation agendas, discussing this with reference to the authors' previous research. It closes by suggesting some modest ways forward that more openly acknowledge the problematics of assessment as a social practice, as well as the need for further research

Understanding agency differently: female youth’s Muslim identities

This paper draws on our recent research into Muslim youth identities to consider theoretical and methodological issues with respect to gender and Muslim women's agency. Western constructions of Muslim women often portray them in essentialised ways as subordinated and without agency. We take up alternative theoretical frameworks that illuminate the limitations of modern understandings of the self and agency, and in particular their problematic association of agency with autonomy. These alternative frameworks also alert us to the possibilities of a different ‘ethics of the self' in which cultivation of Islamic values and submission to the will of God can involve agonistic work on the self which is not without agency. They prompt us to consider the methodological limitations of our research approach, in particular how this agonistic work on the self could readily be flattened and rendered invisible within a focus group discussion. We reflect on the kinds of research spaces which could have been more productive for a richer portrayal of Muslim women's agency. We then turn to our data to explore the complex entanglements of our participants' submission and agency, indicating the different ways female youth assumed, negotiated, and contested ‘subordinated’ identities

Gender symbolism and the expression of post-colonial national and religious identities

This paper traces the symbolic importance of gender to the assertion of national and religious identities drawing on case study data with youth from Senegal, Pakistan, Nigeria and Lebanon. We start with a brief overview of the theoretical and methodological approach to the research. We then illustrate the gender assumptions within youth identity narratives and the ways these produce masculinist and patriarchal national imaginaries that instantiate a heteronormative hierarchy and gender polarity. Intersecting with this, we explore the ways that particular claims to Islam also legitimise and depend on the surveillance and regulation of women. We further show how gender remains a significant dimension of national othering and a site of explicit postcolonial resistance that strengthens and stabilises heteronormative gender hierarchies and associated inequalities. Nevertheless, youth’s imaginaries are of a modernising religious nation, which are articulated in contra-distinction to the secular imaginaries of former colonising nations of the West. Provoked by this opposition, we show how religion is central in the production of nation states, colonial and post-colonial, and the ways that gender is inscribed in both. We point to the gender continuities of the post-colonial and former colonising states. Both sustain the continued surveillance and regulation of women and their bodies are used to inscribe power regimes and define difference. Finally we question the adequacy of liberal understandings of gender equality for disrupting the powerful gender symbolism embedded in youth’s national and religious imaginaries as well as the material conditions that emanate from these