Women’s education has been central to discourses that have sought to modernize developing and Muslim societies. Based on ethnographic data collected from women teachers from rural and low-income communities of Pakistan, the article shows how being a parhi likhi (educated) woman implies acquiring a privileged subject position making claims to middle-class and Islamic morality, and engaging in sp…
How do feminists in the United Kingdom view spirituality and religion? What are their religious and spiritual attitudes, beliefs, and practices? What role do spirituality and religion play in feminists’ lives? This article presents findings from an interview-based study of 30 feminists in England, Scotland, and Wales. It identifies three characteristics of feminists’ approaches to religion and …
This study explores how religious women become legitimate actors in the public sphere and analyzes their agency—its meanings, capacities, and transformative aims. It presents a novel case study of Israeli Modern-Orthodox Agunah activists who engage in highly politicized collective feminist resistance as religious actors working for religious ends. Embedded in and activated by Orthodoxy, they ad…
Much research on women’s religious participation centers on their abilities to act within constricted institutional spaces. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, this study analyzes how African American Muslim women use the mosque as a physical space to enact public performances of religious identity. By occupying, protecting, and appropriating spaces in the mosque for meaningfully g…
Ex-gay ministries, like many evangelical groups, advocate traditional gender ideologies. But their discourses and practices generate masculine ideals that are quite distinct from hegemonic ones. I argue that rather than simply reproducing hegemonic masculinity, ex-gay ministries attempt to realize godly masculinity, an ideal that differs significantly from hegemonic masculinity and is explicitl…
In July 2012 the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government introduced a new set of family migration rules. These rules set a sharp increase in the minimum income threshold for people sponsoring partners and children to join them in the UK. Consequently, there has been a significant reduction in the number of visas granted through the family migration route. This article explores the th…
Many critical studies have warned that government–nonprofit partnership in welfare provision can lead to the marketisation of the nonprofit sector. However, this article contends that the adoption of market-like approaches does not necessarily result in the complete marketisation of the sector. Through a case study of Korean nonprofits engaged in a workfare scheme, this article reveals how nonp…
Ideas that the quality of parental nurturing and attachment in the first years of a child’s life is formative, hard-wiring their brains for success or failure, are reflected in policy reports from across the political spectrum and in targeted services delivering early intervention. In this article we draw on our research into ‘Brain science and early intervention’, using reviews of key policy l…
David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ agenda is best understood in terms of ideological and policy continuities with earlier Conservative and New Labour governments. But where previous post-1979 governments have sought to renegotiate the role of the state mostly through privatisations and marketisations of public services, the ‘Big Society’ agenda also proposed the replacement of the state by individua…
In October 2009, Professor David Nutt, eminent neuropsychopharmacologist and world leading expert on drugs, was dismissed as Chair of the UK government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for comments he made at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies’ Eve Saville lecture. This article considers the role of evidence in political decision-making through the case of David Nutt. It is argue…
The article examines the representation of housing risk in contemporary Australian policy discourse through a critical analysis of two policy texts from the recent Victorian Coalition government (2010–2014). Drawing on governmentality theory and contemporary debates on neoliberalism, it examines how these policy texts perpetuate a discourse in which ‘housing risk’ is primarily understood as an …
Drawing on Autonomist Marxist theory this article situates the 2010–15 Conservative–Liberal Coalition government’s active labour market policy as the most recent phase in a state ‘strategy of underdevelopment’ (Cleaver, 1977) to erode the autonomy of labour power and facilitate a reconfiguration of labour and work to impose (competition for) undesirable jobs on the terms and conditions offered …