Minority students’ responses to racism : the case of Cyprus

While research has focused on the role of racism in (re)producing ethnic/racial inequalities in education, there is very little research that investigates how variability in minority students' responses to racism can be explained. By using an ecological approach to integrate existing research on actors' responses to racism, this study finds that researchers have generally neglected factors and processes situated at the micro- and meso-levels of analysis. Qualitative interview data with Turkish-Cypriot children enrolled in schools in the predominantly Greek-speaking part of the Republic of Cyprus are used to investigate their strategies in response to racism and the factors that explain the observed variability in their responses. The findings suggest the importance of and interactions between factors situated at different levels of analysis, including the level of organizations and social groups and face-to-face interactions in explaining variability in young people's responses to racism

Pilgrimage and Visual Genre: The Architecture of Twentieth-Century Roman Catholic Pilgrimage in Scotland

As Roman Catholics gained confidence in twentieth-century Scotland, they revived pre-Reformation shrines and pilgrimages and created new shrines with transnational connections to the modern Catholic world. Three sites in this campaign were Carfin, a new pilgrimage center based on Lourdes; Whithorn, site of medieval pilgrimages to Saint Ninian; and Dunfermline, associated with the canonized Queen Margaret of Scotland. Each had different meanings for Scottish Catholicism. The landscapes of these shrines included proposed new buildings, completed buildings, including shrines and churches, and existing features, notably caves or grottoes and medieval ruins. Whether found, professionally designed, or made by the clergy and their congregations, these sites framed and ordered pilgrimage rituals and lent them meaning. Seeing common architectural, visual features across these pilgrimages, and drawing on new archival research, we suggest that the employment of recognizable visual genres was a key way of creating a consensus amongst the faithful. International symbols of saintly presence were remade for the local context, with intertwined religious and political intentions, giving tangible expression to a revived Catholicism in Scotland, and promoting a new vision of Scotland as a Catholic nation

Sacred Saliences? Afterlives of Arcaeology in the Restoration of Medieval Shrines

Focusing on the restoration of material culture associated with pilgrimages, the authors examine how a temporally distant period might be reanimated in the present – or, by contrast, retains potential to be animated but remains dormant. They compare two pilgrimage sites, both characterized by disruptive historical caesuras that define salient periods of destruction of valued eras from the past. In Walsingham (England), the key break is represented by the northern European Reformation. At this site, the medieval remains prominent in the present, where it is repeatedly re-enacted, though in the context of loss. In the Monastery of Apostolos Andreas (Cyprus), the significant caesura is more recent, referring to the de facto partition of Cyprus in 1974. Here, the fifteenth-century chapel contained within the site has not been translated into substantial signs of medieval presence or performance. Despite their differences, both cases studied in this paper demonstrate how a caesura designates the period to be recalled and given an ‘afterlife’

Testing the Relationship between Nationalism and Racism: Greek-Cypriot Students' National/Ethnic Identities and Attitudes to Ethnic Out-groups

This article builds on a growing body of research that shows an intrinsic but complex relationship between the concepts and the ideologies of nationalism and racism. In doing so, it investigates how different, meaningful national and ethnic in-group identifications of a dominant national/ethnic group (Greek-Cypriots) within a given national context (Cyprus) influence their perceptions of different, meaningful ethnic and racial minority out-groups. Logistic regression analysis of quantitative survey data with secondary school children (N = 738) in Cyprus shows that the relationship between national/ethnic in-group identifications and out-group perceptions varies according to the social and political relationships between particular national/ethnic in- and outgroups. The findings show that future research on the relationship between nationalism and racism should consider the overlap between and context specific nature of national and ethnic in-group identification processes and the historical, political relationships between different in- and out-groups

An explorative study of ethnic minority students' strategies in response to racism in Cyprus

Considerable sociological research has focused on the nature, occurrence and consequences of racism in education, particularly in the UK. Most of these studies apply a social-constructivist approach and focus mainly on students’ experiences of ethnic stereotyping and discrimination, teachers’ stereotypes of ethnic minority students and the processes and effects of selection, the distribution of classroom resources, and the nature of the knowledge and values taught and sanctioned in schools (for a review, see Stevens 2007). However, little systematic research has been carried out on describing and explaining variability in students’ strategies in response to racism. This is an important area of research as student’s coping strategies in response to racism in school and society can have an important impact on their social and economic success. This study uses data collected from qualitative interviews with Turkish Cypriot ethnic minority students in a Greek Cypriot secondary schools in the Republic of Cyprus. The analysis first describes the nature of students’ experiences with racism and their strategies in response to such incidents. Subsequently, the analysis focuses on the factors and processes that seem to explain students’ decisions to opt for particular strategies, including structural, cultural and physiological barriers and opportunities, the nature of experienced racism and students collective identities. The conclusions discuss the implications of this study for social policy and future sociological research on racism in schools