Rowena Arshad

Encountering Misrecognition: Being Mistaken for Being Muslim

Exploring both debates about misrecognition and explorations of encounters, this article focuses on the experiences of ethnic and religious minority young people who are mistaken for being Muslim in Scotland. We explore experiences of encountering misrecognition, including young peoples understandings of, and responses to, such encounters. Recognizing how racism and religious discrimination operate to marginalize people—and how people manage and respond to this—is crucial in the struggle for social justice. Our focus is on young people from a diversity of ethnic and religious minority groups who are growing up in urban, suburban, and rural Scotland, 382 of whom participated in forty-five focus groups and 224 interviews. We found that young Sikhs, Hindus, and other south Asian young people as well as black and Caribbean young people were regularly mistaken for being Muslim. These encounters tended to take place at school, in taxis, at the airport, and in public spaces. Our analysis points to a dynamic set of interconnected issues shaping young peoples experiences of misrecognition across a range of mediatized, geopoliticized, and educational spaces. Geopolitical events and their representation in the media, the homogenization of the south “Asian” community, and the lack of visibility offered to non-Muslim ethnic and religious minority groups all worked to construct our participants as “Muslims.” Young people demonstrated agency and creativity in handling and responding to these encounters, including using humor, clarifying their religious affiliation, social withdrawal, and ignoring the situation. Redressing misrecognition requires institutional change to ensure parity of participation in society.

Managing Disability Equality in Scotland: Tensions between Social Audit and Disability Equality

This paper focuses on the implications of adopting social audit approaches in order to implement equality policies in Scotland, exploring the tension between surface compliance and deep institutional engagement. Drawing on data from an evaluation of pubic sector bodies’ disability equality schemes, the paper provides examples of different levels of engagement, ranging from surface compliance (some education authorities) to institutional permeation of an equalities ethos (the Scottish Arts Council). The paper concludes by considering the future potential of single equality schemes to promote equality across Scottish society. It is argued that unless there is stronger support and challenge from Scottish government, there is a danger that equality schemes may become paper exercises rather than opportunities for institutional reflection and planning. At the same time, it would be a mistake to dismiss equality planning as merely an exercise in managerialism, since measuring the extent of inequality over time is an essential first step in the long process o f achieving institutional change.

‘Living Rights’, Rights Claims, Performative Citizenship and Young People – The Right to Vote in the Scottish Independence Referendum

ABSTRACT This paper examines the rights claims-making that young people engaged in during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum when the right to vote was extended to 16- and 17-year-olds for the first time in the UK. Understanding citizenship and rights claims-making as performative, we draw on the novel idea of ‘living rights’ to explore how young people ‘shape what these rights are – and become – in the social world’. They are co-existent and situated within the everyday lives of young people, and transcend the traditional idea that rights are merely those that are enshrined in domestic and/or international law. We explore the complex and contested nature of rights claims that were made by young people as ‘active citizens’ in the lead up to the referendum to illustrate how the rights claims-making by young people is bound up with the performativity of citizenship that entails identity construction, political subjectivity (that challenges adult-centric approaches) and social justice.

A Social Justice Perspective on Women in Educational Leadership

Social justice is fundamental to feminism. Feminist theorists place women’s experiences of gender inequalities at the centre of their theorisations about leadership. Feminist critiques of leadership are set in a wider social context. In this chapter, the perspectives of women educational leaders are explored within the wider ‘social justice leadership’ perspective. Internationally, social justice leadership represents a major theme within policy, research and literature with a resurgence of interest into the experiences and perceptions of women in educational leadership. This chapter critically appraises women’s perspectives on educational leadership, by drawing on the experiences of four women head teachers/principals in each of four international contexts, 16 women in total. Case studies, conducted in Scotland, England, Jamaica and New Zealand, provide contrasting, cross-national contexts to compare the influences, possibilities and challenges that women school leaders experience. Each of the country researcher teams was guided by the same interview questions, adopting a common methodological approach for conducting in-depth interviews and the analysis of findings.

Book Review: Rethinking Interventions in RacismBhavnaniReena(2001)Rethinking interventions in racism Trentham Books. ISBN 1 85856 252 X £12.99

experience around five themes: their background and early educational experience; their reasons for wanting to work as a Learning Support Assistant; features of their current practice, their successes and their worries about the job. This has resulted in a series of sixteen stories, written by the Learning Support Assistants themselves, which vary in both style and content. This is ‘light reading’ which might make it more attractive to people in schools wvho might normally shy away from more traditional academic writing.