Harvard University Press Blog

Closing the Civic Empowerment Gap

Meira Levinson’s No Citizen Left Behind is a landmark call for the remaking of civic education in America’s schools. In presenting her challenge to the status quo, Levinson documents a number of organizations that demonstrate the progress to be wrung from her prescriptions. We invited friend of the Press and incoming Harvard Graduate School of Education student Jessica Gerhardstein Gingold to describe her experience as a youth council director with Chicago’s Mikva Challenge, one of the programs that Levinson highlights.

-----

In No Citizen Left Behind Meira Levinson puts some fire into the often dull argument that the United States needs to get serious about civic education, calling for reform for a system that today largely excludes poor and minority students from democratic participation. She begins the book by describing the experience of teaching on 9/11, and shares a remarkable story about her middle school students predicting the Iraq War. Despite their evident understanding, though, she laments that what she calls a “civic empowerment gap” made it unlikely that her students would become participants in the course charted that day:

Whether my students were misguided or prescient, whether their life experiences blinded or exposed them to the true character of our political leaders, there is ample evidence that they are unlikely to become active participants in American civic and political life. As a result, they are unlikely to influence civic and political deliberation or decision-making. This is because there is a profound civic empowerment gap—as large and as disturbing as the reading and math achievement gaps that have received significant national attention in recent years—between ethnoracial minority, naturalized, and especially poor citizens, on the one hand, and White, native-born, and especially middle-class and wealthy citizens, on the other.

Levinson explores the causes of and potential solutions to this gap through many lenses. As a political philosopher, she considers the political, sociological and historical context of the United States and of our education system, closely examining the meanings of citizenship and democracy. She asks hard questions about how we teach civics in a diverse country where our ethnoracial identities invariably dictate our experiences of citizenship. She grapples with how these theories trickle down into practice by sharing personal stories from her years of inner-city teaching. In addressing these questions and others, she doesn’t fantasize about an unreachable Shangri-La of civic education. Instead, she clearly outlines the qualities of her gold standard curriculum, Action Civics, and highlights schools and organizations that have begun to actualize it.

Action Civics is designed to create “an engaged citizenry capable of effective participation in the political process, in their communities, and in the larger society.” It is founded on the principle that young people have authentic civic experiences that matter and that should be part of their civic educational experiences. “I recommend a constructivist approach that helps students construct their own empowering means of engaging in this work,” Levinson writes, “rather than telling them how to do it. As important as it is for students to learn to take multiple perspectives, educators, too, need to be open to students’ diverse perspectives and experiences.” One of the founding organizations of the National Action Civics Collaborative (NACC) is Mikva Challenge, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization whose mission is to create the next generation of civic leaders. Mikva Challenge is one of many organizations that Levinson highlights in her book, and, having been a member of its staff for over two years, I personally witnessed the efficacy of her prescriptions for closing the civic empowerment gap.

Indexing the Age of Fracture

Daniel T. Rodgers, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University, has been named a winner of the 2012 Bancroft Prize for Age of Fracture, his exposition of the late-20th century dissolution of the ideas that had previously served to shape Americans’ understanding of the world. The Bancroft is one of the most distinguished academic awards in the field of history, and, says the book’s editor, Joyce Seltzer, for Rodgers it was well-deserved:

The very first time I read Dan’s manuscript, I knew it was very special. He managed to brilliantly characterize the last three decades of intellectual discourse in the U.S. so as to enable me to see it in a new and revealing light. By mapping out major ideas about the market, race, gender, political obligations, and social welfare, and demonstrating the shift from collective to fragmented perspectives and outlooks, Dan makes the radical changes taking place in our way of thinking provocatively clear. I began to see the transformation he explored everywhere—in the arts, sciences, and in our social and political relations and expectations. Age of Fracture is a wake-up call to all of us that we must pull together again for the greater welfare and future of our community and nation.

Accurately and coherently characterizing an era is a challenging endeavor, especially when one’s period of inquiry is so recent. In his Prologue, Rodgers quotes Stuart Hall on the naming of ages: “What is important are the significant breaks—where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes.” Though the task is to focus on major ideological threads, rather than to catalogue an age’s every idea, one of the striking things about Age of Fracture is just how much ground Rodgers is able to cover in a book that comes in well under 400 pages.

Age of Fracture is certainly no pastiche, though, and it’s also not the sort of free associative cultural criticism that we’d associate with, say, Greil Marcus. Nevertheless, Rodgers makes his way from Jimmy Carter to Judith Butler, the Civil War to the Culture Wars, Game Theory to the Gay Rights Movement, Nietzsche to Noonan, Earl Warren to Alice Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Howard Stern. He covers so much ground, in fact, that we thought we’d just be blunt about it and offer up the Index. Give it a skim or a scour below.

From the Protestant Reformation to the Failure of Modernity

Brad S. Gregory’s new book, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, is very much in the tradition of and in conversation with Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. Both are large, sweeping books that change the way we understand modernity and the world in which we live. For Gregory, that new understanding comes from looking all the way back to the Protestant Reformation, and connecting all that’s come since in ways that scholars have thus far resisted.

He discussed the book with us in a recent episode of the Harvard Press Podcast, which you can hear or download via the player below.

During that conversation, he explained the ways in which he understands modern Western life as stemming from developments of the 16th and 17th centuries:

I don’t think anyone who’s self-reflective about it would deny the rather banal claim that the world that we’re living in today is the product of the past. The issue is what aspects of the past help us to understand and to explain the character of the situation in which we find ourselves. What’s unusual about my book is that it parts ways from the normal methods and the normal assumptions by which even professional historians tend to explain the present. That is, it tends to be assumed that we can account for the world in which we’re living today in the West—North America and Europe—this side, as it were, of the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the French and American revolutions in the late eighteenth century. And, one of the central arguments I’m making in The Unintended Reformation is that that is not the case, and that all of those developments indeed are critical to understanding where we are today, but what we really need to understand are the religious disagreements of the Reformation era, and the unintended processes that they set in motion, without which we will not understand the character of the problems that we’re facing in the early twenty-first century.

It’s Gregory’s claim that the Western world today is “an extraordinarily complex, tangled product of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Western Christianity.” Our failure to understand that lineage, he argues, prevents us from fully recognizing the disaggregation that our society has experienced. From The Unintended Reformation:

On the eve of the Reformation, Latin Christianity comprised for good or ill the far from homogeneous yet institutionalized worldview within which the overwhelming majority of Europeans lived and made sense of their lives. Diversely, early twenty-first-century Westerners live in and think with and even feel through the historical results of its variegated rejections and appropriations in such knotted ways that it is difficult even to see, much less to analyze, them. In getting from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century, this study develops the claim from my first book that “incompatible, deeply held, concretely expressed religious convictions paved a path to a secular society.”

Someday All This Will Be Yours

In a piece published this weekend, Hendrik Hartog, author of Someday All This Will Be Yours, explained that the predominant view of the history of elder care in America isn’t actually very accurate. When thinking of the time before social security, senior homes, and assisted living, people too often imagine families in which children cared for aging parents out of familial love and filial duty, routinely piling three generations into houses together.

But, as Hartog writes, “this portrait is too rosy”:

If we confront what old-age support once looked like — what actually happened when care was almost fully privatized, when the old depended on their families, without the bureaucratic structures and the (under)paid caregivers we take for granted — a different picture emerges.

For the past decade I have been researching cases of family conflict over old-age care in the decades before Social Security. I have found extraordinary testimony about the intimate management of family care: how the old negotiated with the young for what they called retirement, and the exertions of caregiving at a time when support by relatives was the only sustenance available for the old.

In that world, older people could not rely on habit or culture or nature if they wanted their children to support them when they became frail. In an America strongly identified with economic and physical mobility, parents had to offer inducements. Usually, the bait they used was the promise of an inheritance: stay and take care of me and your mother, and someday you will get the house and the farm or the store or the bank account.

But of course what was at stake was never just an economic bargain between rational actors. Older people negotiated with the young to receive love, to be cared for with affection, not just self-interest.

Someday All This Will Be Yours presents the decade of research Hartog conducted, a project he first undertook during an extended stay near his own elderly mother. He eventually assembled a database of more than 200 cases in which a caretaker brought suit, alleging that the deceased had failed to make good on a promise of quid pro quo. In each case, the plaintiff claimed to have been promised, either implicitly or explicitly, that, in exchange for late-life care of their relative, employer, neighbor, or friend, they’d been promised some later recompense such as money or land. As Hartog explains, in order to win the case the aggrieved would have to prove both that a bargain existed and that they’d upheld their half. More often than not, they were unable to do so and were left with nothing.

Such cases, Hartog found, were essentially standard legal business; run-of-the-mill trials evidencing a social dynamic that we’ve somehow largely forgotten in our age of social services. Hartog’s goal for the project was to better understand this history of intimate transaction:

Two Takes on Two Migrations

Earlier this fall we published The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, by William J. Stuntz. The book is a deeply researched examination of the legal machinations that have left the United States with a criminal justice system that seems no longer to be ruled by law. Writing in the New York Review of Books, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens praised Stuntz for accurately describing “the twin problems that pervade American criminal justice today—its overall severity and its disparate treatment of African-Americans,” and described the book as containing “a wealth of overlooked or forgotten historical data, perceptive commentary on the changes in our administration of criminal justice over the years, and suggestions for improvement.”

Stuntz opens the book with a chapter titled “Two Migrations,” in which he considers the massive influx of European immigrants to the United States in the seventy years after World War I together with the northern migration of African Americans in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. The two migrations had many structural similarities, and both triggered urban crime waves, which Stuntz notes is mostly to be expected: “Millions of mostly poor young men uprooted from their homes and moving into crowded slums sounds like a recipe for violence and lawlessness.” But, despite their similarities, Stunts shows that the crime waves actually differed enormously; the first was “short-lived and mild,” the second “long-lasting and severe.”

Comparing these two situations is an incredibly complicated exercise, and Stuntz’s willingness and ability to accept the challenge of such complexity is central to the accomplishment of The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Of the many factors he points to in his consideration of the differing outcomes of these two migrations, one to which he gives great weight is the discrepancy between the political accomplishments of European immigrants and African American migrants: “By the late nineteenth century—when crime in immigrant-dominated cities was mostly falling, not rising—working-class immigrants and their offspring largely governed the justice system that governed them. Even today, African Americans have no such power.”

Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, newly available in paperback, also addresses the differing outcomes of these two migrations. The book chronicles the emergence of a now-deeply embedded cultural notion of African American criminality, one that Muhammad shows to have grown from a dangerously misguided reliance on statistical “evidence.” He contrasts the treatment of African Americans in the urban North to that of working-class whites and European immigrants, and, like Stuntz, helps us to understand how those historical episodes continue to shape our society. 

Stuntz’s book, while wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, is based in his work as a legal scholar; Muhammad’s reflects his training as a historian, and his deep interest in the social sciences. Where Stuntz gives a focus on legal developments and statistical comparison, Muhammad sifts through the cultural and scholarly discourse surrounding those developments and statistics. And for Muhammad, a key to understanding the differing criminal patterns of these two migrations is the fact that the sociological establishment mobilized itself to argue for the integration of European immigrants, but left African Americans out of that effort, believing as they did that black people committing crimes were merely reflecting either their cultural or racial inferiority, and that sociological resources shouldn’t be wasted on them. As Muhammad explained it to us in a recent conversation:

By and large, the entire edifice of sociology (was) deploying its resources against eugenics and Social Darwinism to say that immigrants are not infecting American society with their degenerate blood… “They’re providing real energy and effort to our labor pool, they’re helping us build America. And that some of them should fall into a life of crime is more our fault than theirs, because we haven’t given them a fair opportunity. We stigmatize them, and our nativist proclivities make it very difficult for immigrants to live the lives that they came here to pursue.” And basically they never put black people into that equation. They left black people out of that kind of very structuralist, environmental critique of the origins of white European or white ethnic criminality.

You can hear Muhammad make that point and others in the video below.

 

So in the comparison of these two migrations, where Stuntz shows us political advancement for European immigrants and subsequent demographic shifts that largely prevented African Americans from making similar gains, Muhammad highlights a formidable social apparatus undergirding the rise of one group and helping to maintain the lower status of the other.

These two books, covering similar ground in different ways, help to remind us how important it is to reach across disciplinary lines in our attempts to understand the world in which we live. 

Books for Understanding the Execution of Troy Davis

Last night, in the face of powerful reasons to doubt his guilt, the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis. Since his initial conviction, seven of the nine witnesses have either changed or recanted their testimony. Some have said that they were coerced by police to testify against Davis. There’s reason to believe another man committed the murder for which Davis was convicted. Hundreds of thousands of people signed petitions calling for a stay. Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu, 51 members of Congress, Amnesty International, the Innocence Project, and even a former FBI Director asked for clemency. But late last night the United States Supreme Court unanimously denied a stay, and Troy Davis was put to death.

What a terribly crass moment to think of hawking books. So forget about that. Nobody here is trying to sell you anything today. But moments like this, when power acts in inexplicable and indefensible ways, are also when we most need the knowledge that books can give. The case of Troy Davis puts us in mind of three books we've recently published, a trio that together help us to understand how we’ve arrived at what feels so much like a miscarriage of justice.

The first is William J. Stuntz’s The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, which is looking more and more like the book that many of us have been waiting for. Stuntz, a leading legal scholar who passed away earlier this year, wrote the book in an attempt to help bring this large, multi-faceted issue into focus. The historians, economists, sociologists, and law professors who study crime, criminal justice, and the surrounding politics have had too little to say to each other, he wrote. The Collapse of American Criminal Justice tells the larger story by making the connections so as to better understand why our criminal justice system tolerates so much crime and produces so little justice, especially for poor people and for African Americans. It’s a big, complicated web that Stuntz was uniquely positioned to unravel. The justice system is broken in large part because it’s no longer driven by law, Stuntz found, but instead by the discretion of officials who no longer accurately represent the localities they’re appointed to serve. Discretionary justice too often amounts to discriminatory justice, where police are free to make choices and bend rules and prosecutors are free to pursue cases like the one against Troy Davis. We’ll have more to say about this immensely important book in the months ahead.

From the collapse of law to the utter fallibility of the procedures meant to enforce it. Brandon L. Garrett’s Convicting the Innocent, a book we’ve been proud to see get its rightful attention since publication earlier this year, is a systematic study of what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing. This week Garrett wrote a powerful commentary on the Troy Davis case, illustrating just how flawed his prosecution had been and calling it a “perfect storm of botched eyewitness-identification procedures.” He continued:

The eyewitness identifications in the Troy Davis case do not remotely pass muster based on what we know today about eyewitness memory—they were not double-blind, they were not conducted properly, and the staged re-enactment was blatantly suggestive. Nor is there any other indication that these witnesses were reliable… The Troy Davis case is a case about the death penalty and also about how much risk of error we as a society can tolerate. It is a case about judicial reluctance to meaningfully examine new evidence of innocence, including witness recantations. It is a case about jailhouse informants. But the Troy Davis case is finally a case about the fragility and malleability of eyewitness memory. And the eyes of the world are now on Georgia.

Finally, from collapsed law and fallible prosecution to the death penalty in the United States, the only Western nation to still practice capital punishment. While Stuntz and Garrett have written passionate books that make clear recommendations for improving our systems, David Garland’s Peculiar Institution is a cool, clear-eyed sociological look at what purpose the death penalty serves in America. His answer is that it’s largely a cultural function, not one of justice. He argues that the death penalty in America continues the long legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, southern lynching, and racial discrimination. He explained his book’s title in a post here last year:

The American death penalty is peculiar insofar as it is the only capital punishment system still in use in the West. It is peculiar insofar as the forms through which it is now enacted are ambivalent and poorly adapted to the stated purposes of criminal justice. And it is peculiar inasmuch as today’s capital punishment law and practice have been shaped, time and time again, by the nation’s history of racial violence and the legal struggle against it.

That analysis has been echoed over and over in discussion of the Troy Davis case.

The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Convicting the Innocent. Peculiar Institution. Strange how their very titles map the sad, sorry course of what this country did to Troy Davis last night.

Deng Xiaoping and China's Rise

“I first visited China in 1979, a few months after our countries normalized relations. China was just beginning to remake its economy, and I was in the first Senate delegation to witness this evolution. Traveling through the country last month, I could see how much China had changed in 32 years — and yet the debate about its remarkable rise remains familiar. Then, as now, there were concerns about what a growing China meant to America and the world.”

That’s Vice President Joe Biden, from an op-ed titled “China’s Rise Isn’t Our Demise” that ran in yesterday’s New York Times. As Biden notes, 1979 was a turning point for China’s place in the world. The country was opening itself up, working to normalize its relations with other nations and finally bring its industry and economy into the twentieth century. All of the developments that Biden encountered on his recent visit were set in motion by those earlier changes. And no one was more responsible for those changes than Deng Xiaoping, China’s preeminent leader from 1978 through 1992.

In 1979 Ezra F. Vogel published a book, Japan as Number One, that helped prepare westerners for Japan’s surprising 1980s rise. After retiring from teaching in 2000, Vogel wanted to do it again, to write another book that would help Americans understand key developments in Asia at the outset of the twenty-first century. The biggest thing happening in Asia was China, as Vogel realized then and Biden affirms now. And the way to understand China was to understand Deng. So Vogel began the work for what became Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, a massive biography of a man who likely had as great an impact on the world’s course as any other twentieth century figure.

Deng led a long, complicated life that included time in France and the Soviet Union as a young man, years as a military leader and Communist Party official, and a long, fraught relationship with Mao Zedong, who twice purged Deng but never destroyed him. Vogel describes Deng as a pragmatic politician who led China’s embrace of technological innovation and worked to overcome the damage of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, but who also approved the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. He wasn’t usually the source of the ideas that were transforming China, but he was the only person equipped to implement them. 

We spoke with Ezra Vogel about Deng and the challenges he faced: 

 

Anti-Intellectual Populism and Evangelical Self-Understanding

We’re soon to publish The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, by Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson. The book is an exploration of intellectual authority within evangelicalism, a seemingly insular world in which, according to Stephens and Giberson, the teachings of dubiously credentialed leaders are favored over the word of secular experts in the arts and sciences. We invited Stephens and Giberson, who each have roots in evangelicalism, to answer a few questions about evangelical truth and its place in American life. 

-----

Q: Recent observers, including Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker, regard statements like Michele Bachmann’s endorsement of evangelical historian and philosopher Francis Schaeffer as anomalous or bizarre. But you argue that huge numbers of Americans embrace ideas like these. Can you explain how beliefs that appear extreme to outside observers can seem mainstream to their Evangelical adherents?

Many of the extreme and puzzling beliefs of evangelicals—like dinosaurs being contemporary with humans—are beliefs that they are raised with. Trusted but uninformed authorities in evangelical churches and religious schools present these ideas to laypeople and ministers so often and so convincingly that many grow up accepting them as obviously true.

Q: In The Anointed, you discuss knowledge authorities in diverse fields—history, evolutionary science, and psychology, among other domains. What threads connect these figures?

There are two threads that run through our Anointed authorities. The first is an appealing “Christianizing” of the ideas. David Barton “Christianizes” American history; Ken Ham “Christianizes” the science of our origins; James Dobson “Christianizes” social science, including the definition of the family. The “Christianizing” of these ideas, by default, undermines the credibility of secular ideas that might challenge the positions promoted by the Anointed leaders.

The second thread is old-fashioned American anti-intellectual populism. Barton, Ham, Dobson, and other Anointed leaders tend to make no effort to engage the fields they claim to represent. Barton never subjects his claims about American history to peer review in a journal. Ken Ham and James Dobson do no scientific research. In the secular world ideas get vetted in the academy through peer review in technical journals; then they appear in serious but more popular outlets; and then finally they might get discussed on the radio. The ideas of the Anointed cut out all these middlemen and appear immediately on the radio or television.

“Riots in The Cause of Consumer Goods"

It’s difficult to discuss what’s been happening in London this past week without tipping one’s ideological hand from jump. The language calls for choices that reflect opinions. “Rioting” is the term being used most frequently by politicians and news outlets. Many on the left reject that label, though. “Uprising” is a term they see as more appropriate. Others, like the journalist Darcus Howe, call it an “insurrection.” Many who use the term “rioting” are inclined to dismiss the people on the streets as opportunistic looters, acting out with no cause; those saying “insurrection” and “uprising” tell a different story, of a politically and economically neglected group set off by the police shooting of a young black man.

The shooting itself may have been an unpredictable spark, but Paul Gilroy, via twitter, noted that “It is completely absurd to say that nobody expected this.” Gilroy, a professor at the London School of Economics who we’ve published several times, has been tweeting about the situation all week. People online have been turning to him for insight, but he’s remained resolute in his stance that the cause of these events is plain.

“We all know perfectly well why this is happening. The price of operating inside the official bubble is too high these days.”

“You already know enough. So do I. It's not knowledge we lack what is missing is the courage to understand what we know & to draw conclusions.”

Gilroy also retweeted the following from @DayMoonRoseDawn:

“They said we had to BUY! BUY! We couldn't afford it, so they gave us credit and said BUY! BUY! Then they stop the credit. It's now byebye!”

This socioeconomic analysis was echoed in a Granta post by Gabriel Gbadamosi:

These looters are doing what they’re supposed to; grabbing the goods they see in the shops and can’t buy in a recession. They loot the bling – the sports shoes, gold watches, mobile phones and plasma TVs; and you can recognize the very poor when you see a woman looting potatoes from a corner shop. These acquisitive looters are certainly copying the gold standard of a social contract eroded by and evaporating with the money. These are riots in the cause of consumer goods.

That’s also the explanation offered by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, whose Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?, we published in 2008. Bauman wrote a post for Social Europe Journal on “Consumerism Coming Home to Roost.” “These are not hunger or bread riots,” he explained. “These are riots of defective and disqualified consumers.” More:

From cradle to coffin we are trained and drilled to treat shops as pharmacies filled with drugs to cure or at least mitigate all illnesses and afflictions of our lives and lives in common. Shops and shopping acquire thereby a fully and truly eschatological dimension. Supermarkets, as George Ritzer famously put it, are our temples; and so, I may add, the shopping lists are our breviaries, while strolls along the shopping malls become our pilgrimages. Buying on impulse and getting rid of possessions no longer sufficiently attractive in order to put more attractive ones in their place are our most enthusing emotions. The fullness of consumer enjoyment means fullness of life. I shop, therefore I am. To shop or not to shop, this is the question.

For defective consumers, those contemporary have-nots, non-shopping is the jarring and festering stigma of a life un-fulfilled – and of own nonentity and good-for-nothingness. Not just the absence of pleasure: absence of human dignity. Of life meaning. Ultimately, of humanity and any other ground for self-respect and respect of the others around.

This way of thinking presents modern society as a world organized around consumption, certain to break down when economic collapse excludes so many from the consuming. Of course, consumption has only replaced other earlier points of consensus, and the events in London serve as a reminder of that shift. We heard from Richard Howells, our European Sales Director, based in our London office, that the past week has left him thinking of Daniel Rodgers’ recent book, Age of Fracture. The book looks specifically at the US, but much of its analysis of the increasing fluidity and even breakdown of all of our mid-century principles of collective purpose can also help us to understand the UK. Rodgers argues that our categories of social reality have been fractured, and, as Richard relates, London is seeing the effects of that fracture on its streets.

Muslims and Multicultural Backlash

In recent months, mainstream European leaders of nations like Germany, England, and the Netherlands have been fiercely critical of their countries’ policies of multiculturalism. After some of the political rhetoric intensified around last week’s anniversary of the 7/7 attacks in the UK, we discussed the situation with Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, in the exchange posted below. Morey and Yaqin are the authors of Framing Muslims: Stereotyping And Representation After 9/11, and the leaders of the Framing Muslims project, an international research network exploring the representation of Muslim identities in contemporary cultural discourse. Their book examines the creation and dissemination of those representations in different Western nations, and the effects of the gap between the representations and realities.

-----

Q: There’s a newly invigorated backlash against multiculturalism sweeping through parts of Western Europe. Where do you think this new vehemence is coming from, and what’s your reaction to it?

The strength of recent political pronouncements can in part be understood as a phase in a cycle that involves scapegoating so-called “outsiders” at times of economic and social crisis. It’s no coincidence that the leaders have picked up on this now when there’s a global recession and their policies appear to be ineffectual in the face of larger forces.

Like so much of the debate around multiculturalism, there is often no clarity in the way the term is used by the press and politicians—although “state multiculturalism” is berated, such speakers seldom take the time to actually give any examples of this insidious phenomenon which is supposedly undermining Western Society.

However, there’s also been a sense in these countries that large-scale migrations are the cause of social tensions and crisis. Again, dominant political discourses can use this sense to their own ends. For example, in the 2010 British General Election all parties were suddenly keen to appear tough on the issue of immigration, based largely on the unproven claim that extremism of both right wing and Islamist kinds was being allowed to fester because politicians had fought shy of the issue in the past. Inasmuch as there is any evidence of widespread popular concern about multiculturalism, you often tend to find the sentiment strongest in areas with comparatively little experience of direct immigration into local neighborhoods. This suggests that this kind of anxiety is second-hand, as it were, and generated by press and media coverage which often takes its cue from political agendas and is sometimes quite hysterical in tone.

So, it’s partly to do with genuine fears and partly to do with political convenience.

Q. Your book, Framing Muslims, is about the ways that Muslims are represented (you use the word “caricatured”) in media and popular culture. Are those representations functionally distinct from how Muslims are represented by government speech and policy? If so, how do you think the two inform one another?

There is a strong connection between political and media and popular cultural discourses around Muslims. However, this relationship isn’t straightforward or easy. On one level, it seems self-evident that the weight of negative depictions since 9/11 has led to hostile views of Islam and correspondingly aggressive actions.