Firouz Gaini

Promising Nordic practices in gender equality promotion: Developing teacher education dialogue, practice, and policy cycles on-line:

This case study examines a Nordic on-line course on gender equality promotion in education, in which principals, teachers, school staff and gender equality activists engaged in dialogue regarding contents and practices. The on-line course was designed with reference to promising practices identified in a previous Nordic network project. The article considers challenges appearing across localities in relation to diversity, in gender equality promotion practices, policies and pedagogies. Digitalisation enables educational collaboration among teacher education institutions between the distant Nordic countries and facilitates the dissemination of Nordic education and the gender equality model, but this raises questions about whether these forms of education and equality are globally ‘branded’; and whether an intersectional gender equality promotion approach can be contextually and locally specific. This paper focuses on the contradictions of gender/sex binary concepts impairing understandings of diversity, sexuality and identity, the consequences of the emergence of scepticism toward practice standardisation, discrepancies between norms of equal treatment and critical reflection, and the development of citizen-based actions initiating policy changes. It is shown that the results of the project will benefit Nordic collaboration on teacher education development.

Wherever I Drop Anchor

This paper investigates the connection between young people’s local identities and future perspectives regarding physical mobility and home with Zygmunt Bauman’s concepts of ‘liquid modernity’ and ‘anchor’ as theoretical framework. 40 semi-structured interviews with eight graders from two different communities provide the empirical setting for discussions and analyses. The results paint a clear picture of young islanders critically negotiating their ‘glocal’ identities as independent ‘bricoleurs’ in a complex late modern world. Their individual priorities and strategies support the use of the maritime metaphor of ‘anchoring’ in the quest for a better understanding of identity formation today. Young people’s identities and values, the paper concludes, cannot be unveiled without strong attention to local contexts and glocal processes.

Book Review: Transforming Globalization: Challenges and Opportunities in the Post 9/11 Era

It is, for many reasons, a heavy task to evaluate and review Transforming Globalization. The book, a collection of 11 articles edited by the American sociologists Bruce Podobnik (Lewis and Clark College) and Thomas Reifer (University of San Diego), is part of the ‘Studies in Critical Social Sciences’ series (edited by David Fasenfest, Wayne State University) that ‘offers insights into the current reality by exploring the content and consequence of power relationships under capitalism’. The subject under investigation is enormous, embracing environmentalists, socialists, anarchists, trade unionists, indigenous political movements, ‘freedom fighters’, neohippies, Third World peasants and urban proletariat, student unions, etc., making it almost impossible to find a common heading for the struggle, although the whole umbrella of colourful movements propagates alternatives to the so-called neoliberal global capitalism. The book’s subtitle, Challenges and Opportunities in the Post 9/11 Era, gives the reader false hopes of finding suggestions regarding future developments of the globalization process. The direction is not given. The 13 authors, most of them American sociologists, give interesting and quite thought-provoking contributions to the presentation and analysis of the resistance movements in the world today, but lack in most cases any clear conclusions, any adequate answers, that the eager reader probably hopes (even if it is never guaranteed) to find. The first article (by Podobnik and Reifer) is an introduction to the popular struggle for alternative forms of globalization with a very inspiring historical perspective (mentioning the financial globalization between 1870 and 1914), giving the contemporary chaotic struggle a new dimension, but unfortunately this dimension is not reflected in any of the following articles, which concentrate on the last decades of the 20th century. The articles give detailed information on the different groups of the global movement, on their links and cooperation, on their aims and strategies, on the recruitment and mobilization of members and on their actions and campaigns. The classic case of the Zapatistas of southern Mexico is discussed in a very interesting and provocative chapter on ‘indigenous resistance’ (by Hall and Fenelon). Also, the historic alliance between workers’ unions and the young international environmentalists, the ‘blue–green coalitions’, coupled in the streets of Seattle in 1999, is discussed thoroughly (by Gould et al.). Readers get a rich and comprehensive picture of the thoroughly global character of the movement that comprises thousands of groups and associations, on their progressive use of modern media (Internet) to mobilize action within a few days around the whole globe, on their geographical and social composition, and on ‘trends’ in the protest movement. What I miss when reading the book is a major theoretical discussion, a stronger presentation of scientific methodologies, and definitions of key concepts such as ‘globalization’. The discussions seem to be Reviews: The Scope of Sociology Gaini