Vehicle For Liberation Research Articles

Anti-Colonial Defeat: The 1967 Naksa and Its Consequences

This entry asks what it means to mourn the loss of the state as a vehicle for revolutionary liberation. State power was indeed authoritarian, and global solidarity in the era of the Third World Movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was superfluous, but it still meant something to people then and now. Losing it was felt. In this piece, I revisit the 1967 Arab defeat against Israel known as al-Naksa (the resounding setback) within the context of the Third World movement and its influence on global solidarity in the ensuing decades following 1967. I focus on the loss of Egypt’s position as an anti-colonial leader after the 1967 war and subsequent death of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970. Egypt, once a bastion of revolutionary anti-colonial fervor at the nexus of Pan-Arab and Pan-African imaginaries, and a hub of the historic Third World, became radically realigned with the Global North under Anwar Sadat. I argue that the fate of the Egyptians, Palestinians, Arabs, and of anti-colonial global struggle each became unlinked and siloed as individual struggles. It is not just Arabs or Egyptians or Palestinians who were defeated, it was a whole anti-colonial ethos. How do we mourn the loss of the state as a vehicle for liberation, for Palestinians, for Arabs, for Africans, and for the post-colony?

Pendidikan Kritis Mansour Fakih: Sudut Pandang Pendidikan Islam

Education has a final orientation as a form of humanization, namely humanizing humans, and aims as a vehicle for liberation. One of the figures who brought this idea up was Mansour Fakih, a social activist who is aggressively voicing education from the point of view of the marginalized. This study uses qualitative research methods with the type of literature study. The results show that the idea of education with Mansour Fakih's critical paradigm can improve the domination structure which is considered inappropriate in the field of education by producing a critical perspective. A review of Islamic education can later have implications for education that eliminates aspects of class, humanist education, and critical ideas aligned with Islamic views. From these three concepts, it is hoped that education in Indonesia can be better in the future structurally and culturally so that it can become a vehicle for learning to think critically for the next generation of people who innovate with development.

Digesting Tensions and Change

Digesting Tensions and Change

Background Characteristics of the Individuals Attaining Higher Education in India: A Sociological Study of Srinagar City

Aim: Higher education has experienced major changes in last few decades in India in terms of its expansion, content and reach. Massification of higher education has increased access to education and people belonging to different social backgrounds are getting enrolled in higher education. A pertinent question that emerges here is: what kind of relationship exists between the background characteristics of people and the levels and types of higher education they attain? This descriptive study provides a comprehensive answer.
 Method: This empirical work is conducted in Srinagar city of India. It covered 704 respondents belonging to 245 households. Survey method was used for collecting primary data and structured interviews were conducted by making use of interview-schedule.
 Results: This study finds that higher education in Srinagar is readily available for many but such availability is embedded within constraints related to gender, age, occupation and education of parents and caste related identities. People coming from different social backgrounds acquire different types and levels of higher education. It creates hierarchy among and within academic courses of higher education and inequalities among the groups.
 Conclusion: Higher education reflects as well as promotes social inequalities in contemporary context and thus the egalitarian goals of higher education are getting compromised. There is need to bring change in the courses and contents of higher education so that it can address to dynamic needs of people coming from different backgrounds. Education needs to become a vehicle for liberation and social transformation and should not remain a mere agency of social reproduction.
 Key words: social background; courses within higher education; higher education in different contexts; gender; caste; parent’s background; descriptive study.

Taking the Sting Out: Manifesting Aggression and Containing Difficult States in a Relational Group Psychotherapy

This paper describes ways of handling aggression and difficulty in containing intense emotional experiences in group psychotherapy. The clinical vignette illustrates how, in cases of overprotectiveness, an external trigger may sometime serve as a vehicle of liberation and ventilation. The therapist’s enactment in response to the sudden penetration of a wasp into the room is discussed by relating to the functions it serves in the process of encountering aggression, as well as the group and therapist’s capacity to move from “twoness” to a “co-created third.” Whereas aggression, in general, is difficult to deal with, in a group it might prove to be extremely threatening, posing dangers unique to groups. Moreover, openly discussing the group conductor’s aggressiveness is especially challenging in a group. The paper illustrates the fruitful intersection of group analytic thinking and relational psychoanalytic conceptualization.

Sacred Music and Hindu Religious Experience: From Ancient Roots to the Modern Classical Tradition

While music plays a significant role in many of the world’s religions, it is in the Hindu religion that one finds one of the closest bonds between music and religious experience extending for millennia. The recitation of the syllable OM and the chanting of Sanskrit Mantras and hymns from the Vedas formed the core of ancient fire sacrifices. The Upanishads articulated OM as Śabda-Brahman, the Sound-Absolute that became the object of meditation in Yoga. First described by Bharata in the Nātya-Śāstra as a sacred art with reference to Rasa (emotional states), ancient music or Sangīta was a vehicle of liberation (Mokṣa) founded in the worship of deities such as Brahmā, Vishnu, Śiva, and Goddess Sarasvatī. Medieval Tantra and music texts introduced the concept of Nāda-Brahman as the source of sacred music that was understood in terms of Rāgas, melodic formulas, and Tālas, rhythms, forming the basis of Indian music today. Nearly all genres of Indian music, whether the classical Dhrupad and Khayal, or the devotional Bhajan and Kīrtan, share a common theoretical and practical understanding, and are bound together in a mystical spirituality based on the experience of sacred sound. Drawing upon ancient and medieval texts and Bhakti traditions, this article describes how music enables Hindu religious experience in fundamental ways. By citing several examples from the modern Hindustani classical vocal tradition of Khayal, including text and audio/video weblinks, it is revealed how the classical songs contain the wisdom of Hinduism and provide a deeper appreciation of the many musical styles that currently permeate the Hindu and Yoga landscapes of the West.

Cinema and Development in West Africa: Film as a Vehicle for Liberation, James E. Genova (2013)

Cinema and Development in West Africa: Film as a Vehicle for Liberation, James E. Genova (2013)

HIGHER EDUCATION AND THE LIBERATION STRUGGLE IN THE FORMER QWAQWA HOMELAND: A FREIREAN APPROACH

Paulo Freire’s widely respected work on pedagogies of the oppressed (1996) and hope (1992) made him known across the world. He is known to have, among many of his unravelling thoughts, objected to oppression and illuminated hope and freedom for the oppressed. In addition, Freire maintained that the liberation of the oppressed and, by extension, the liberation of the oppressor can emanate only from the oppressed. Thus, the ball in this regard may inadvertently be seen to be in the court of the oppressed. The South African higher education system in particular, as well as the education system in general, have continuously presented, contrary to the oppressors’ intentions, lecture rooms as sites or spaces where oppressive tendencies were deliberated and challenged. Contributing to the interrogation of, or on, oppression was an underlying quest for liberation, grounded on the utility of higher education as a vehicle for liberation. Therefore, higher education could not be divorced from the liberation struggle. In this article, the author traverses the history of the liberation struggle through the eyes of those who cared to write about it, as well as those who walked and toiled the grounds and lecture rooms of the then University of the North (Qwaqwa Branch), and the three former teacher training colleges in the former Qwaqwa homeland. It is argued that, while the reason for the existence of the former was to build capacity among the civil servants in the homeland and the provision of teaching qualifications for the latter (colleges), those higher education institutions made far-reaching and indelible contributions in respect of dealing with oppression and advancing the liberation struggle during the apartheid era and beyond.

“I haven’t seen you since (a specific date, a time, the weather)”: Global Identity and the Reinscription of Subjectivity in Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing

“Who am I? Where am I? Where and to whom do I belong?” These are, according to sociologist Ulrich Beck (1997: 107), key questions facing the individual in the globalizing world. Yet even this formulation is too essentialist, the interrogative pronouns pointing to monolithic sources upon which to found contemporary identities. The present is a time “when power is no longer so neatly centred or easily tracked and when people’s lives and identities are no longer so neatly bounded or easily located” (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010: 255). Contemporary literature holds a unique position: through fiction, writers connect aesthetically with the public imagination, commenting and reflecting upon contemporary instabilities. In Shanghai Dancing , Australian author Brian Castro not only presents readers with a protagonist whose national heritage is so “spectacularly hybridised” that he explodes “any perceived distinction between a homogenous, dominant culture and multiethnic others” (Brennan 2008: 4), his innovative and linguistically challenging prose performs playful subjective shifts. Whilst Castro’s novels often envision dialogues between different cultural affiliations (principally those pertinent to his own hybridized identities - Australian, Chinese, Portuguese, French, and English), Shanghai Dancing also blurs autobiography with fiction to explore the multiple negotiations within contemporary identity construction. This article offers a detailed reading of the literary representations of identity in Shanghai Dancing . Focusing upon perceptual deixis in the form of pronoun usage and narrative address, particularly the literary manipulation of pronominal positioning, the analysis links Castro’s experimental poetics to his socio-political critique. In a reflective essay, the author suggests that autobiography and the first-person pronoun “invokes multiplicity” and offers “a proliferation of selves. A juxtaposing of differences”. He declares “ I am not only Portuguese, Chinese and French, but I am writing myself out of crippling essentialist categorisations, out of the control exerted over multiplicities .” (1999 [1996]: 114-5; original italics). Thus, multiple subjective positionings are both a feature of the innovative texture of Castro’s prose and a vehicle of liberation. This article places Castro’s writing within the discourse of metamodernism, tendering “ aesth-ethical ” commitment (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010) and being “pointedly relational, turning as it does on self and other’s foundational co-relationality with respect to one another” (Moraru 2011: 17). The analysis shows that Shanghai Dancing depicts metamodernist identity as self-reflexive for characters and more significantly for writer and readers too, whose cosmopolitan identities (our attitudes, our purchases, our leisure activities including literary reading) connect with and are complicit in modern global capitalism.

Of Mice and Men: Educational Technology in Pakistan’s Public School System

In this paper I use a critical lens to examine the introduction and adaptation of computer and information and communication technologies in Pakistan’s educational system. This examination is based on two broad contentions: a) the introduction of technology in Pakistan’s educational system is not conducive to the creation of a locally relevant knowledge system; instead the motivation is to create a market for foreign technology (hardware and software) and technological ideas; b) such an uncritical introduction of technology suits the needs of the undemocratic governments and hierarchical societies in the developing world and the neo-liberal economic forces abroad. I argue that such introduction of technology in education suits the former because, unlike critical education, the market model of education does not prepare students to question unjust and inequitable social and political practices around them. It rather suits the latter because education based on a market model produces a global pool of semi-trained laborers that can process technological and scientific raw material without gaining the expertise required to produce knowledge that is socially relevant and of benefit to them. I conclude that in this way technology becomes a source of hegemony and yet another tool of oppression rather than a vehicle for liberation and a just society.

Critical language awareness and people's English

People's English is part of an overall thrust to establish People's Education for People's Power in South Africa. People's English calls for the politicisation of the English syllabus. This paper argues that Critical Language Awareness has an important contribution to make to People's English. A set of CLA classroom materials entitled Language and Position will be examined and the methodology for their development will be discussed. I will attempt to show that both content and method contribute to the empowerment of teachers and students. People's English was part of a broad attempt on the part of the National Education Crisis Committee to establish People's Education for People's Power in South Africa during the late 1980s. The draft proposals for People's English maintained that if the study of English is to empower students and serve as a vehicle for liberation, language competence must include the ability: to say and write what one means to hear what is said and what is hidden to Defend one's point of...