Problematic Ideologies Research Articles

Educating Muslim American Youth in a Post-9/11 Era: A Critical Review of Policy and Practice

Through a review of educational research literature this piece explores how federal politics and policies have trickled down into secondary schools, and what the effects of these policies have been on secondary schools, paying particular attention to the effects on Muslim American youth. The main research questions are: What federal and state policies, specifically those constructed as measures of ensuring national security, have affected secondary schools? What are the effects of this policy on Muslim American youth? What pedagogical practices can be changed to engage these youth in active citizenship-in a post 9/11 context- for meaningful inclusion and participation in their societies? This review will critically examine the USA PATRIOT Act, a federal law designed and implemented after the terrorist attacked of 9/11, with the aim of understanding how the law has contributed to the growing national anti-Muslim sentiment. Findings suggest that this law has contributed to the over-targeting of Arabs and Arab-American families and students, and has had damaging effects on their educational outcomes, psychosocial well-being and sense of nation and belonging. Additionally, findings suggest that laws framed around securitization are constructed around problematic ideologies that lie beneath dominant and main-stream discourses around Islam.

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Late Modernist Poetics: From Pound to Prynne. Anthony Mellors. Manchester University Press, 2005. ix + 230 pp. $50.00 (cloth). A research fellow in the School of English at UCE Birmingham, the editor of fragmente: a magazine of contemporary poetics, and a poet in his own right, Anthony Mellors speaks most eloquently in his closest readings, in his astute, crystalline analyses of the politics and poetries of Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, and J. H. Prynne. In Late Modernist Poetics from Pound to Prynne, the reader encounters, in Mellors's sinewy, percipient observations of the aforementioned poets and their mythic method(s), a singularly enduring and assuredly prudent voice. Predictably, then, Mellors offers a cogent and compelling examination of Pound's mythic (and hermetic) method, his trenchant and nefarious politics, and those belated modernists who, having embraced Pound's method in pursuit of reactionary (and radical) leftist agendas, unwittingly reaffirm Pound's problematic ideology. Mellors contends that while myths may be apotheosized as 'supreme fictions,' intuitive representations of social and cosmic unity, they can also be understood as fact[s] (2), as giving access to new kinds of spiritual, cultural, and political realities. When understood as both producing and communicating such realities, the mythic (and hermetic) method of Pound, characterized by his theories of instinct, nature, and secret wisdom (44), leads not to the liberal ideologies typically associated with the many late- and postmodernists who subsequently employ Pound's method but to a well-publicized set of racist and authoritarian beliefs (44). In light of this, such a method, embraced by so many late- and postmodernist poets, would seem to preclude any disavowal of Pound's abhorrent politics. According to Mellors, it only stands to reason that these poets would find themselves (invariably) unable to consummate the leftist utopias and political agnosticisms that form the pragmatic ground in and through which they reify their aesthetic ideals. For Mellors, Charles Olson stands as a nonpareil example of this belated modernist advocating an untenable revolutionary politics: [Olson's] historical practice attests to the unity of experience as the prime matter of poetry, but it supports a phallic, egotistical ideology that is inconsistent with its universalist claims (96). Ultimately, though many poets-including Olson and J. H. Prynne (a British poet who has greatly influenced the contemporary British avant-garde, who has only recently been accepted canonical surveys of contemporary British poetry, and who is claimed as a late modernist by Mellors)-try to transform Pound's mythic (and hermetic) method into a new conception of civic virtue (144), they cannot seem to dissociate their critiques of rationalism, consumerism, and modernity from a nostalgic sanctification of nature, a naive apotheosis of instinct, and a self-interested conception of the poet as shaman and savior. Interestingly, Mellors mentions William Carlos Williams only in passing, seemingly remarkable given that Mellors himself acknowledges that Williams represents, as he sees it, a prominent modernist and that Williams certainly employed a method in Kora in Hell, in Paterson that could be called, at least tentatively, mythic. And yet, this not so disconcerting when one understands that Mellors concerns himself primarily with the mythic method of Pound, a method that is characterized by the hermetic, which refers to both the forging of private, enigmatic iconologies and the subordination of sense to sound, creating an interplay of deeply obscure significance and numinous vacancies (4). …

Problematic ideologies in teacher education

A critical problem facing educationiuls is the problematic quality of many teacher training courses. Vie major source o f the problem seems to be the irrational ideological foundations on which these courses are often based. The research theme revolves around a particular type of problematic ideology, viz. lecturing course teams in teacher training whose members refuse to adopt an integrated, muiually-compatible approach when teaching students how to teach. Such course teams in.s'ist on transferring contradictory, subjective views o f teaching to student teachers. It is estimated that a high percentage of students annually qualifying as teachers in South Africa are, from a professional point of view, incompetent to teach. The argument is outlined in three parts: statement of problem, theoretical argimients being forwarded to justify problematic ideologies, and possible solutions. Bearing in mind the far-reaching implications f the situation, the solution could be to appoint a prescriptive controlling body/inspect orate whose members' main task would be to raise teacher training standards in South Africa. Experience in more developed countries suggests that such a controlling body would only function effectively if composed of representatives from other social sciences, schools, future employers (of pupils), educationists, and the government.

Retired dreams: Dom Casmurro, myth and modernity

Retired Dreams explores this tension. Dixon identifies the quest myth, highly displaced, as the underlying narrative model and the shaper of the narrator's thinking. He devotes separate chapters to the function of time, to the rebirth motif, the role of matriarchy and patriarchy, the voyage motif and woman as anima, and symbols and primitivism. Particular attention is given to the role of the major tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) as devices permitting both the connection and the distancing between the tradition of heroic discourse and the domesticated, unheroic reality of the novel' characters. Through this rhetorical-mythic lens, the book examines many of the factors that have continued to fascinate both general readers and critics - the work's ambiguous plot and characterization its problematic ideology its self-conscious artistry and its cosmic vision.