State Endorsement Research Articles

Gender stereotypes in the Single National Curriculum, Pakistan.

Background: The Single National Curriculum (SNC) sponsored by the Government of Pakistan aimed to provide a level socio-economic playing field for all students. This paper analyzes the books of grades 1-5 under SNC to specifically test the gender biases and stereotypes promoted within them. 
 Methodology: The paper conducts a detailed inquiry of the various instances of overt and covert misogyny encountered in the text and illustrations of these books through the theoretical framework of the hidden curriculum. It looks at what kind of professional and personal activities men and women are depicted to be engaged in. By tallying all gendered illustrations and using qualitative content analysis to assess gendered textual biases, the research questions whether the state is promoting a certain gender ideology through these revised books.
 Results: Several problematic depictions of women and the erasure of gendered minorities are revealed, and questions are raised about the purpose of such discrimination in a state-sponsored curriculum. Women are presented in stereotypical caregiving and similar roles in both public and private spaces, with meager representations in sports, STEM, and other professions. The texts also feature heavy religious sub-texts to lend the content credibility. Since the SNC is created and promoted by the state itself, the overt and covert misogyny in the textbooks exposes the state's endorsement of unequal gender norms in the country.
 Conclusion: The SNC textbooks are actively promoting the hidden curriculum of gender inequality which will affect the behaviors and beliefs of the next generation. For the playing fields to be leveled for all, the books should have been gender-sensitive and should have actively reduced gender inequalities through their content. Alas, there are great discrepancies in the vision and the actual reality of the Single National Curriculum.

Jazz Autobiography and the Cold War

This article explores several key autobiographies by jazz musicians and the ways in which they represent the use of jazz by the United States on the cultural front of the Cold War. It examines varying approaches to writing about the involvement of the autobiographical subject with the cultural diplomacy (or cultural containment) policies of the United States and investigates the historical effort made by the United States to feature jazz as an important element of its cultural propaganda mission. Moreover, it assesses how this effort relates to jazz autobiography, for which it helped to create a market by being one of the forces driving (and being driven by) the memorialization and institutionalization of jazz. The musician-autobiographers were keenly aware of the positions in which they were placed by participating in the US State Department's tours. Autobiographies by Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Teddy Wilson, George Wein, and Hampton Hawes reveal a strategy of tempering the reservations and cynicism about the state's endorsement of jazz by choosing to center on personal-scale interaction, in which opportunities for taking responsibility for another person are found. That is to say, one theme running through major jazz autobiographies regarding how to handle the ethical and political considerations created by the use of jazz in the cultural diplomacy of the United States has been to ground personal participation in an impersonal global strategy within personal exchange, by deflecting political ambivalence and questions of political commodification of art by focusing on gestures of friendship and civility within the situations created by the state's global strategy.

Communal Harmony as Governmentality: Reciprocity, peace-keeping, state legitimacy, and citizenship in contemporary India

AbstractDebates about secularism in post-independence India have often revolved around the visions of two of the country's founding fathers—M. K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. A sharp distinction is drawn between them by those who argue that the Gandhian model (or, what in common parlance and state discourses is called communal harmony) stems from Indian cultural and religious values, and lies beyond the realm of the state. The Nehruvian model, however, is a state project through and through. This article transcends this dichotomy to show that the association of Nehru and Gandhi with these models does not necessarily mean that secularism and communal harmony faithfully reflect their ideas and, despite the differences in their aims and methods, both models are united in the discourses and practices of the state as strategies of ‘governmentality’. After redefining the core of communal harmony as reciprocity (rather than tolerance), I show how it is performed, how it supplements the state's efforts to keep the peace in a religiously plural society by the force of law, and shores up the state's legitimacy deficit. However, the state's simultaneous involvement in Nehruvian and Gandhian projects is not an innocuous fact because it undermines the state's constitutional and secular obligations to non-discriminatory citizenship in the Indian nation. The argument is that the state's endorsement ofdargah-centred Islamic piety as an exemplary site of communal harmony and particular ideas of the Indian nation legitimized by communal harmony ‘problematizes’ the national belonging of certain kinds of pious Muslims.