Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper seeks to divert the multicultural debate to a new path. Instead of a theoretical discourse that focuses on the normative question: how should the law treat claims for collective rights of various cultural and religious minority groups, this paper suggests a more concrete case analysis that explores the actual dynamics of law making in that regard. My argument will be that it is time move forward and to explore both the influence of the multicultural debate on actual law making and the feasibility of its arguments when theory serves as a basis for legal practice. In particular I will explore the gender implications of that process by analyzing one recent specific example in which the law (in this case the Israeli law) confronted a multicultural dilemma and resolved it.
A few years ago and after a process of deliberation the Israeli legislature legalized and legitimized the practice of separate seating for men and women in public buses that serve the religious Ultra Orthodox community.
In doing so the legislature relied heavily on multicultural arguments borrowing the basic terminology and rationales of the theoretical literature in that regard. Thus the practice was legalized only after it was declared the it serves the mutual interests of both men and women in the community, that Ultra Orthodox women welcome the practice and that the desirability of the practice should be judged based on the internal perspective of this religious community and should not be subjected to an external secular liberal perspective that tends to be suspicious toward any practice of sexual segregation. My analysis of this case will critically examine the manner in which those arguments were introduced and deliberated and will try to expose the detrimental consequences for women.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper explores the relationship between the production of national identity and multiculturalism in Irish schools and society. Combining discourse analytic, in-depth interviewing and observational techniques, I explore and analyze how knowledge about the Irish nation and what it means to be Irish is constructed, and how this intersects with the production of curricular knowledge about “race,” racism, anti-racism, and racialized minorities. I examine these recent multicultural—or intercultural educational initiatives as they are officially described in Irish policy circles—in terms of the likelihood that they will, in fact, “help to reduce racism” as claimed in recent educational policy documents and curricular guidelines. I seek to promote a deeper understanding of the ways in which racial inequality can ironically be reproduced through educational policies and practices which are purported to have egalitarian and anti-racist aims. Specifically, I argue that the introduction of intercultural educational policies, practices and curricular content designed to celebrate diversity and “help reduce racism” in actuality have the effect of abnormalizing diversity and reinforcing minority students’ sense of “otherness,” of misrepresenting or ignoring minority students’ cultural identities, and of reinforcing erroneous assumptions about “race,” racism and the nature of difference more generally. Characterizing multiculturalism as a form of symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 2001), I suggest that the implementation of intercultural education in schools fulfils a political function of providing an educational palliative to minorities while pre-empting resistance and thereby reproducing existing relations of educational consumption.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: It is a commonplace to assert the incompatibilities of various political visions within multicultural debates particularly in the American context. Indeed, the hallmark of our culturally plural milieu and more generally of the ongoing “culture wars” is perhaps the claim that there can be no intermingled space between competing visions even as the investments of any particular vision seem spurred on by those positioned as threatening of its boundaries. From racial identity politics that purportedly seek singular cultural forms of recognition to liberal nationalist claims that such balkanization threatens the collective agency of the nation, from liberal feminist claims that recognition of the rights of other cultures threaten the aims of autonomy for women to liberal equalitarians who argue that any privileging of cultural difference diffuses the proper promise of liberal equality- all seem threatened and wounded by the others, all seem resentful not only of the ascendance of the others but also their possible connections to them. Certainly one common refrain is to advocate a rising above of such resentful attachments, to fashion political promises that can speak to all rather than maintain resentments that inevitably lead to stale promises. I explore this problematic between promising and resentment through the work of Nietzsche and Foucault. In the process, I argue that promising only springs from the working through of resentments, that it is only in working through one’s resentments that conceptions of identity and the visions attached to them can yield promises within a culture of democratic action.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between capabilitiy appcoaches and multiculturalism in the narrow sense of the word.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The paper starts with a critical review of multicultralism as a form of
hidden racism presenting itself as a form of charitable recognition and
tolerance towards the "other", who is assigned a specific place within the
utopian space of an ideal open american public space shared by all citizens
as equals. Multiculturalism works smoothly as long as the "ethnics" know
their place and prove their normal identity as human beings and citizens.
However, under this message of normalizing the "ethnics", the hidden subtext
of this message is putting these groups under a permanent state of under
probation surveillance. This state of under probation becomes visible in
times of crisis like September Eleven, when the thin surface of tolerant
multiculturalism melts and the underlying racism emerges from its hiding.