Defending identities or segregating communities? Faith-based schooling and the UK Jewish community

Valins, Oliver

doi:10.1016/s0016-7185(02)00076-3

Cited by 41 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 16 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Firstly, there is considerable scope to broaden the conception of social difference upon which the field is based, which has to date been dominated by analyses of class and race/ethnicity. Valins (2003), for example, demonstrates the importance of addressing questions about faith-based communities in an analysis of Jewish day schools which explores how community leaders, with greater or lesser approval from parents, set out to construct and defend particular versions of Jewishness. In this case, the aim of community leaders is to use state-funded faith schooling to reproduce particular visions of Jewish identity, a process supported by the British Government in their pursuit of academic standards, and one which reinforces the identity of a minority group at the same time that it recreates lines of exclusion.…”

Section: Social Geographies Of Educational Provision and Consumptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geographies of education and the significance of children, youth and families

Holloway

Hubbard

Jöns

et al. 2010

Progress in Human Geography

221

169

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper engages with Hanson Thiem’s (2009) critique of geographies of education. Accepting the premise that education warrants fuller attention by geographers, the paper nonetheless argues that engaging with research on children, youth and families reshapes understanding of what has been, and might be, achieved. Foregrounding young people as the subjects rather than objects of education demands that attention be paid to their current and future life-worlds, in both inward and outward looking geographies of education. It also requires a broadening of our spatial lens, in terms of what ‘count’ as educational spaces, and the places where we study these.

show abstract

Section: Social Geographies Of Educational Provision and Consumptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geographies of education and the significance of children, youth and families

Holloway

Hubbard

Jöns

et al. 2010

Progress in Human Geography

221

169

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The response from many to this framing statement has been the rejoinder, “Yes, we do!” If religion was once off‐topic, debates about the role of bishops in the House of Lords (Engelke ), state sponsorship of religious schools (Valins ), Sharia law and religious animal‐slaughtering practices (for halal and kosher meat) today dominate British public discourse. Since leaving office, Blair has increasingly emphasized how religion shaped his personal and political attitudes: “As the years of my premiership passed, one fact struck me with increasing force: that failure to understand the power of religion meant failure to understand the modern world.…”

Section: Public Religion In Britainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Faith in Conversation: Translation, Translanguaging, and the British God Debate

Brink-Danan

2015

J Linguistic Anthropol

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Faith in Conversation: Translation, Translanguaging, and the British God Debate Taking ideas about interfaith communication among stakeholders in the British "God Debate" as an illustrative case, I propose that the translation metaphor, widely adopted across disciplines, might productively be replaced by a different metaphor, "translanguaging" (García and Wei 2013). I suggest that the model of sociolinguistic relations offered by translanguaging nicely addresses the genealogical inseparability of "religious" language and "secular" language. This working replacement for the translation metaphor invites new kinds of philosophical and anthropological engagements with difference and may be extended to the analysis of other phenomena that demand nonbinary thought, such as transculturalism, transgenderism and transnationalism. [translation metaphor, translanguaging, Britain, religion, interfaith dialogue] IntroductionT wo decades ago, the American philosopher Richard Rorty coined the provocative phrase "religion as a conversation-stopper," arguing that religious justifications had no place in liberal-democratic debate. Responding to criticism that pious folks are forced to "restructure their arguments in purely secular terms before they can be presented," Rorty (1999:173) replied that " 'restructuring the arguments in purely secular terms' just means 'dropping reference to the source of the premises of the arguments,' and that this omission seems a reasonable price to pay for religious liberty." Less than a decade later, Rorty reconsidered, admitting that he was unlikely to convince religious people to "trim their utterances" to fit his ideal kind of public reason. Nevertheless, he urged citizens of democratic countries to "keep the conversation going without citing unarguable first principles, either philosophical or religious" (Rorty 2003:148-149).By that time, many leading philosophers, prominent among them Jürgen Habermas, had begun protracted inquiry into the role that religion could play in deliberative democratic process. Suggesting that religious people speak "religious" and secularists "secular," Habermas, building on the work of philosopher John Rawls, softened Rorty's argument, suggesting that demanding total erasure of religious convictions from the public sphere placed an onerous burden on the pious. But he also asserted that, in order for religious people to speak in the liberal public sphere, they must subscribe to a "translation proviso":Instead of subjecting all citizens to the imposition of cleansing their public comments and opinion of religious rhetoric, an institutional filter should be established between informal bs_bs_banner Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 25, Issue 2, pp. 173-194, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395. © 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/jola.12088. 173 communication in the public arena and formal deliberations of political bodies that yield to collectively binding decisions. (Habermas 2011:26) In order for religious v...

show abstract

“…Many geographical studies have defined schools as institutional spaces (Philo and Parr 2000) within which dominant narratives of national identity are constructed (Mitchell 2003) and young people encounter the socio‐spatial transmission of normative values (Collins and Coleman 2008; Fielding 2000; Holloway et al 2010; Holt 2007). Within this framing, faith schools have been conceptualised by geographers as alternative spaces where dominant narratives are challenged, negotiated or reworked (Dwyer 1993; Hemming 2009; Kong 2005; Valins 2003). In particular, attention has been focused on how faith schools pose challenges to state narratives of belonging, emphasising the importance of building a religious community in the case of Muslims in Singapore (Kong 2005), for example, or providing competing constructions of ‘integration’ in the case of Jewish and Muslim schools in England (Dwyer 1993; Valins 2003).…”

Section: Geographies Of Education: Schools and Community Cohesionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Within this framing, faith schools have been conceptualised by geographers as alternative spaces where dominant narratives are challenged, negotiated or reworked (Dwyer 1993; Hemming 2009; Kong 2005; Valins 2003). In particular, attention has been focused on how faith schools pose challenges to state narratives of belonging, emphasising the importance of building a religious community in the case of Muslims in Singapore (Kong 2005), for example, or providing competing constructions of ‘integration’ in the case of Jewish and Muslim schools in England (Dwyer 1993; Valins 2003). Such studies of faith schools draw attention to how schools are often defined by the state as key spaces of interaction and encounter between different groups and thus as important sites for ‘interethnic’ or ‘multicultural’ engagement (Amin 2002; Valentine 2008).…”

Section: Geographies Of Education: Schools and Community Cohesionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

‘Faith in the system?’ State‐funded faith schools in England and the contested parameters of community cohesion

Dwyer¹,

Parutis²

2012

Trans Inst British Geog

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Within the wider context of interest in the relationships between faith and the state, this paper focuses on the case of state‐funded faith schools in England and how opposition to them has been mobilised and negotiated. Discussion focuses specifically on the role of community cohesion policy – a policy adopted to combat social and ethnic division after 2001 – and the contested parameters of this policy when introduced to monitor schools. Analysis suggests that faith school providers were able to interpret the policy in ways that challenged government articulations and reworked dominant meanings, revealing the political and spatial instabilities of the policy. However, our analysis suggests that these challenges to state meanings were less successful in shaping mechanisms to monitor admissions practices in faith schools – producing some unanticipated entanglements of state and religious authority with implications for the shaping of communal religious life. These findings both add to the wider critical policy analysis of community cohesion policy and contribute to debates about the role of religion in the public sphere.

show abstract

Defending identities or segregating communities? Faith-based schooling and the UK Jewish community

Cited by 41 publications

References 16 publications

Geographies of education and the significance of children, youth and families

Geographies of education and the significance of children, youth and families

Faith in Conversation: Translation, Translanguaging, and the British God Debate

‘Faith in the system?’ State‐funded faith schools in England and the contested parameters of community cohesion

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About