Western Academia Research Articles

The Influence of the Muslim Brotherhood on Teaching Islam in American Universities

The significance of the Muslim Brotherhood in American academia lies in the academic articulation of the brothers’ discourse as the expression of modern Islam in general. As such, the discourse of a specific political group is taken as the appropriate example of modern mainstream Islam. This treatment of the brothers’ discourse has resulted in an assumption that Islam, or at least modern Islam, is essentially political. It is not surprising, therefore, that one can easily find courses that teach “Islam and Politics,” or “Islam and Democracy,” which have no parallel in courses taught on other religions. What creates this distortion is not the mere political nature of the Brothers as an organization. It is the redefinition of Islam as has been presented by the brothers’ discourse since its foundation. There, Islam is presented as a differentiated structure that mirrors the differentiated structure of the secular state. Islam is presented as a comprehensive modern system that includes a number of complementary systems: political, economic, social, educational, health, etc. that work in harmony, guided by the rational principle of maṣlaḥah, public interest. The discourse of the Brothers defined the object of studies for American academia and set its research agenda. Not only has this presentation of Islam over politicized it, but it marginalized a plethora of significant traditional structures and concepts, as well as several modern responses that are not included in the brothers’ discourse. The overpoliticization of Islam and presenting it as nece­ssarily Islamism has become not just a problem of media misrep­resentation, but a crisis in the quality of knowledge about Islam that is produced and nurtured in academia. Moreover, this situation developed two unfortunate scholarships on modern Islam in Western academia that further distorted and blocked our knowledge on Islam: one is minor and Islamophobic, the other is major and Islamophilic. The Islamophobic approach sees Islam as inherently opposed to the modern structures of civil society, democracy, cultural diversity, and free market. The Islamophilic approach portrays Islamism—seen as the normative form of modern Islam, which is embraced by Muslim societies, as legitimate and popular native protest movement against non-democratic regimes. An exploration of John Esposito, whose scholarship has set the tone on Islam in academia for decades, and whose books have been widely adopted in courses taught in American universities will prove my argument.

International Quality Gatekeeping as Service to the Field, and the Need for Epistemic Humility in Its Implementation

In Short Academics in Western universities, especially those in the United States, are frequently called on to serve as quality gatekeepers in other higher education systems. International opportunities for service to the profession can take many forms, ranging from program reviews to expert consultations, and they constitute a great opportunity to learn about a different higher education system and gain perspective about deeply held assumptions. These opportunities are fraught when not approached with intellectual humility and can result in negative outcomes, amplified by power asymmetry and the disproportional weight of the perspective of Western academics. Cultural sensitivity can be learned and, regardless of our area of specialization, we all can become better-quality gatekeepers and have a more positive impact in the world.

Sufism among Western Academics and Women: Analysis of Distributional Factors

Sufism among Western Academics and Women: Analysis of Distributional Factors

Russian War, Neocolonialism and Holocaust Studies in Ukraine

Abstract This text is related to the theme of the usage of historical narratives about WWII in the current Russian War against Ukraine. It is a brief analysis of the instrumentalisation of Holocaust history in Russian propaganda, as well as the role of historians as enablers in these processes. The essay also focuses on the issue of decolonization of historical narratives in Western academia and Ukrainian discourses of WWII in the context of the Russian–Ukrainian War. The final issue discussed in this text concerns how Russian aggression in Ukraine has affected academic studies and research on the history of the Holocaust in Ukraine and EU countries.

The continuity of Othering in feminist methodology: activist-scholar and the insider/outsider dynamics

In this article, I argue for the need to nuance our understanding of insider/outsider relations and challenge self–other dynamics in the research process. Using my own research field experience to set up how Othering occurs, I engage with the rigidity of the insider/outsider dynamic and the inflexibility arising from how ‘Western’ knowledge production processes ask one to maintain objectivity and, therefore, replicate the power dynamics between the self and Other. The aim here is to unpack how this process related to my own position vis-à-vis the community researched, my positionality, and how this interacts with the practices required to ensure research rigidity in Western academia. Thus, this article argues that redefining the self in an ‘either/or’ form essentially speaks to Western questions of objectivity, cultural difference and homogeneity. This article is an attempt to problematise the Othering nature of the process of defining oneself in relation or contrast to research participants – a method that continues to define the entrenched binaries of a reality dominated by hierarchised opposites.

Avoiding failure in academia: strategies from non-Western early career researchers in the UK

ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of neoliberalism affecting the higher education sector, critical research in marketing and management remains dominated by Western Eurocentric theories. As a result, non-Western researchers are expected to socialise with the Western theoretical discourse to succeed and progress in Western academia. In this paper, we reflected on our personal experiences as early career researchers from Southeast Asia who have studied and are currently working in the UK as we navigate around the structural expectations, challenges, and strategies in pursuing our research. We merged our voices with those of other doctoral students from non-Western backgrounds in the discipline to present some coping mechanisms that researchers like us adopt to avoid failure in academia. We argue that the conformity to Western academia and its hidden struggles produce risk-averse junior researchers; thus, limiting creativity, diversity, and potential growth in the discipline.

Decolonizing public and planetary health, or Chthulucene mediations.

The struggle for decolonization, especially in public and planetary health, indeed requires a relational space as a call for global accountability.1 The recent correspondence rightly pointed out the dominance of Western academia in the discussions and worried about treating ‘decolonization’ as just another buzzword. It can be argued whether newer terms of mediation such as Chthulucene within the language of systems thinking can intervene for the future of global health. The concept of the Chthulucene enters the debates as a current synthesis of the previous analyses on the current epoch, i.e. Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Plantationocene. Donna Haraway coined the term to mean the ‘name for the dynamic ongoing sym-chthonic forces’ that makes possible the ‘flourishing for rich multispecies assemblages’.2 In these assemblages, Haraway notes, ‘it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems’.2 On this note, we can highlight the panelists on Decolonizing Health at Harvard Medical School, Mariam Olivia Fofana, Desmond Jumbam and Munshi Shehnaz, who discussed how global health cannot easily disentangle the uneven power relations of the existing system. They review the origins of global health and deliberate how its legacy impacts current practices and identify imbalances in global health knowledge production research practices, funding opportunities and acknowledgment of research contributions from researchers in the global South.

Decolonising Sinology: on Sinology’s weaponisation of the discourse of race

ABSTRACT The previous generation of Sinologists were of the overwhelming consensus that race consciousness did not exist in pre-modern China. However, in recent decades there has been a revision of this consensus. This paper frames this shift in terms of Sinology’s complicity with white supremacy, imperialism and the military-industrial-academic complex. Contemporary Sinology sets itself up as exposing a colonial mentality in pre-modern China. The irony is that it is contemporary Sinology which is complicit with white supremacy and itself is in need of decolonisation. This paper will analyse the most prominent example of this sea-shift in the Sinological consensus on race in China: Frank Dikötter’s The Discourse of Race in Modern China. That such scholarship, deficient in the most basic scholarly standards, was overwhelmingly feted upon its publication, continues to be cited as an authority and to receive inordinate recognition reveals Western academia’s problematic attitudes towards China and the issue of racism. This paper will show how all of the above phenomena can be understood in terms of the “epistemology of ignorance.” By misappropriating the discourse of the critical philosophy of race, Sinology’s epistemology of ignorance universalises Western racism. Sinology has weaponised the discourse of race.

Sufis as Sacred Props: Hagiographical Transmutation of Shāh Ḥusayn (945/1538–1008/1599)

Sufism has been subjected to reformist ideas, whether by the colonial Orientalists or the post-colonial Islamic Republic of Pakistan. This research investigates the process of colonial and post-colonial reformism through the hagiographical transmutation of a malāmatī Qādirī Sufi, Shāh Ḥusayn. It observes that the idea of colonial reformism cannot be thoroughly applied in this case—the post-colonial Pakistani state rigorously implemented its reformist policies and transmuted the saint’s image, while Western academia depicts him as queer. Therefore, the paper argues that Sufis have been used as sacred props by colonial and post-colonial reformists and scholars, resulting in multiple and contradictory Shāh Ḥusayns.

The paradox of tolerance in Western academia

The subject of the research is the modern educational environment of Western countries. The object of the study is the system of tolerance and the mechanisms of its functioning in the educational environment of Western countries. The author examines in detail the system of tolerance and the mechanisms of its functioning on the example of Western educational institutions. Since in the modern educational environment of the Euro-Atlantic states tolerance is perceived differently than in Russia, special attention is paid to the philosophical understanding of the current state of the phenomenon and its reflection by the Western scientific community. The author uses works of both philosophical and social, pedagogical orientation in order to reveal the main features through their prism. In the course of the study, it was found that the mechanisms of tolerance in the Western educational environment contradict the idea of tolerance for the Other. It was concluded that the boundaries of tolerance in Euro-Atlantic educational institutions are blurred: they are not clear either to the teaching staff or to the students themselves. The author traces the Nietzschean idea of ressentiment in the actions of minorities, constantly opposed to the majority, regardless of what rights and opportunities this majority gives them. The study also made it possible to identify the paradox of tolerance in the Western educational environment: although the struggle for the rights of the oppressed is officially proclaimed, the oppressed themselves avoid discussions on the topic of equal opportunities within the framework of the educational process, because the Western structure of tolerance allows them to avoid discussing pressing issues, while maintaining and even building on the benefits of a tolerant education system. In addition, the author found that Western society usually does not perceive tolerance as part of an individual's worldview, which leads to the fact that in the education of Western countries it becomes a socio-political tool.

Words from on High: The Impact of the Belt and Road Initiative on Chinese Investment in Sub-Saharan Africa

As China increasingly asserts itself as a global superpower, western academics and policymakers have grown evermore wary of the nation’s actions abroad. One particular field of concern has involved the perception of a growing Chinese footprint in Sub-Saharan Africa, financed and directed by the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Using open-source research, this paper attempts to determine if, indeed, Chinese investment in Africa is growing. Additionally, this paper attempts to determine if and to what extent Chinese investment in Africa is the result of the BRI. Ultimately, this paper concludes that Chinese investment in Africa has – counterintuitively – decreased since the introduction of the BRI. This paper attempts to establish how the faulty perception of increased Chinese presence in Africa could come to be so commonly accepted, and why this might be the result of western readers unwisely taking the words of Chinese officials at face value.

On Decolonizing Curriculums: The Unethicality and Implications of Western Knowledge on Arab Subjectivity

AbstractIn this essay (originally delivered as a lecture at Alberta University of the Arts), my thoughts are centered around the question of the ethics of knowledge as an Arab racialized pedagogue and researcher in Western academia. Today, as I grapple with the notion of decolonization, I wish to think about the ways in which knowledge, or what is deemed as knowledge, is read and inscribed, interpreted, distorted, and even silenced in our epistemologies, and of its implications on my subjectivity as an Arab. I wish to think about how this knowledge also constitutes the ethics on which we knowingly, or unknowingly, participate in the everydayness of our lived realities; I suggest that we engage in “epistemic resistance” and “epistemic activism” as “practices of interrogation and resistance that unmask, disrupt, uproot biases and insensitivity.”

The evolution of Li Dazhao’s Chinese nationalism

ABSTRACT Studies on Chinese nationalism in Western academia have been influenced by a popular theory called ‘the culturalism-to-nationalism thesis’, a loosely formulated interpretive paradigm which emerged in late 1960s. The literature on this topic, however, reveals an inadequate understanding of traditional Chinese thinking and its influence on Chinese thought in modern history. An examination of the work of Li Dazhao (1889–1927) and his philosophical heritage not only will open up a valuable source for us to rethink about this thesis and its defects, but also will shed light on the complicated background and perspective that give rise to modern Chinese nationalism. Given the interest in Chinese nationalism in contemporary world, an understanding of its historical roots is particularly timely, since in order to understand China’s current and future actions one must understand the origins of Chinese nationalist thinking and its transformations in time. This paper makes a contribution to that historical understanding. I argue that traditional Chinese philosophy, especially the Daoist world view and Confucian ethics played a significant role in shaping Li’s patriotic and nationalist stance. It also predisposed him intellectually to accept the internationalist characteristic of Marxism.

Recognizing the past to navigate the stewardship of public health futures.

People easily and quickly forget. At present, academia in the Global North is constantly discussing about decolonization with the supposed goal of having a more inclusive and diverse discursive space for people in the Global South. From the macro perspective, the power relations of discursive spaces globally, as predominated by Western academia, dictate debates for the time being. Upon the emergence of another concept, it would be possible that decolonization would become another buzzword. The increased use of social media is also affecting memory deficits on the individual level.1 For a systemic stewardship of planetary and public health futures2 to be accomplished, it is imperative to realize that forgetting the past may present critical lapses in managing our planet’s potential futures. It has been recognized that an interdisciplinary approach to planetary and public health research is significant to grasp the components and dynamics of changes in socioecological systems. For this to come into fruition, memory studies must be integrated in the discourses of futures thinking.

On the Origin of Transculturalism: A Study Into the Western Academic Context and its Chinese Translation

Abstract The concept of transculturalism has often been used to describe the increasingly complicated interactions between different cultures under the circumstances of globalization. It is also widely used in international communication and intercultural studies in China, and is often translated into different Chinese concepts such as “跨文化” “超越文化” “转文化”. How can we better understand the meaning of this concept in different academic contexts? This paper discovered that this concept was developed as criticism of post-colonialism and that of Western cultural studies reflecting a worldview that is centered on Euro-centrism. The Chinese translation of transculturalism should accordingly vary in different academic discourses. The concept is of great significance to promote cultural equality, cultural connection and respect, cultural exchange and mutual learning. However, cultural competition and western-centrism embedded in Welsch’s definition of transculturalism is worthy of attention.

Comment on “Emerging and Near Future Challenges of Higher Education in East Asia”

Higher education in East Asia has undergone a miraculous transformation in just over two decades since the turn of the century. Its quantitative expansion, qualitative improvement, and the rapid advances in academic productivity in this century are impressive achievements. Philip Altbach, a leading authority on comparative education research, once described Asian higher education from the perspective of dependency and neocolonialism, placing it on the “periphery” of the international knowledge and higher education system (Altbach, 2004). However, the argument that a structurally hierarchical “center-periphery” relationship exists between the Western and non-Western higher education systems has lost its relevance in the contemporary context. Although Horta (2023) argues the dynamic development of the East Asian higher education system from the perspective of massification and globalization, he mainly discusses its problems and challenges from a comprehensive and diverse range of perspectives. Having fully recognized the persuasive arguments presented, I humbly make the following three comments, particularly from the perspective of globalization and the internationalization of higher education. When considering the breakthrough of higher education in East Asia, the focal point is Chinese higher education. Horta (2023) suggests that China's and other East Asian academic production systems need to be more internationalized, noting the relatively small proportion of international co-authored publications of East Asia compared with those of Western Europe. Horta also explains its background as “the governance, organisation, understanding, and application of academic freedom among other characteristics of Chinese institutions are essentially national, shaped and associated with the Chinese political regime. Moreover, these factors may not be particularly appealing to other higher education systems in the region”. Although I completely agree with Horta's observations and arguments, a more in-depth discussion of higher education in China would allow for further consideration of the development of higher education in East Asia as a whole. For example, how was China able to achieve such rapid growth in academic research productivity without “academic freedom,” which has been deemed essential for research promotion in the history of Western academia? How can China's remarkable progress of scientific and technological research be used to solve various global issues such as preventing global warming and tackling infectious diseases collaborating with the international society in the current political and diplomatic context? East Asian intra-regional student and faculty mobility and university partnership-based cross-border activities are increasing rapidly and represent the de facto integration of higher education in the region (Kuroda & Passarelli, 2009). Policy discussions on Asian regional cooperation in higher education are progressing and becoming increasingly vigorous. Referring to Fedorova and Skobleva (2020), Horta (2023) also suggests “HEIs and accreditation agencies in East Asia may also play crucial roles in adopting new technologies, such as the ones related to blockchain, that can improve the governance of HEIs by simplifying bureaucracies and administrative processes, can produce digital academic certifications”. This is a very insightful discussion in the contemporary context, but it requires more discussion of the actual prospects and possible regional arrangements needed to achieve these innovative visions. Horta (2023) clearly indicates that “the human development model in the East Asian setting (for example, the J-Model; see Cummings & Altbach, 1997) continues to rely on strong human capital formation, STEM fields, and governments coordinating manpower and job planning as well as coordinating science and technology”. Indeed, Cummings explained the core of a human resource development strategy common throughout Asia which he named the J-model, or Japanese Model. Although recognizing that this model has no great difference from the arguments of “The East Asian Miracle” (World Bank, 1993)—which sees the cause of East Asian economic success as due to the role of strong government and human capital formation of the region and that the Japanese Model has been stagnant for last three decades, I would be most interested in how the fast development of East Asian higher education in the 21st century can be newly modeled and if there is any different understanding from the “J-model”.

Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century by Kaysha Corinealdi (review)

Reviewed by: Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century by Kaysha Corinealdi Claire Alarid (bio) A Review of Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century by Kaysha Corinealdi Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century by Kaysha Corinealdi is a much-anticipated and crucial dive into the history of Afro-Caribbean diasporic communities, which White and Western academia often ignore or misrepresent. Corinealdi, a historian of modern empires, migration, gender, and activism in the Americas at Emerson College, delivers a powerful reading to challenge the narrative of Afro-Caribbeans and people of African descent as perpetual outsiders. By considering how Afro-Caribbean Panamanians helped construct their communities and the wider isthmus through activism, internationalism, and vision, Corinealdi dispels the myth of passive or reactionary participation, which targets communities of African descent across the globe, including in Panama. Corinealdi organizes her history both chronologically and thematically, using critical historical events to situate the larger themes and ideas the Afro-Caribbean diaspora has shaped in Panama and, later, the United States. Her first chapter, an introduction dedicated to the foundations of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in Panama and the constructs which helped drive their activism, contains the bulk of Corinealdi's theoretical approach to this subject. Importantly, she outlines the opposing view that Panama was not the center of U.S. empire-making. Rather, it was an "inherently Iberian space" and a country intent on protecting itself from '"undesirable" and helpless Black foreigners (Corinealdi 2022, 3). Corinealdi argues otherwise, focusing on Afro-Caribbeans in Panama (and elsewhere) as producers of knowledge and active participants in their history, not passive bystanders "merely at the service of imperial and national structures" (Corinealdi 2022, 20). Corinealdi thus uplifts and promotes Black internationalism and multiculturalism, a vision for economic and political upward mobility, and Black enterprises that actively shaped the diaspora and the larger Panamanian culture. Chapter one, "Panama as Diaspora: Documenting Afro-Caribbean Panamanian Histories, 1928–1936," focuses on the Panama Tribune, a newspaper unique in its centrality as a source of current events and ideological vision for Afro-Caribbeans in Panama. The Tribune, Corinealdi argues, was a source of world-building that appealed to the working class owing to its candid discussions on immigration policy, discrimination, education, and labor through a critical and aspirational lens (Corinealdi 2022, 29). Important to Corinealdi's discussion is the established male-dominated leadership in the Black press internationally and the way the Tribune subverted this norm through a women's [End Page 123] section. In this section, writers like Linda Smart Chubb could freely discuss issues of interest to the diaspora and the role of women, who had long been erased as key contributors to the community and continued to experience exclusion (Corinealdi 2022, 33). By providing examples of the few women contributors with significant and often controversial ideas, many of which faced severe criticism, Corinealdi highlights that even within oppressed groups, some continue to face marginalization. Gender inequality within the diaspora received little recognition in the community, raising questions about the role of the patriarchy in shaping Afro-Caribbean Panamanian history. In this chapter, Corinealdi adds subtle commentary which feels poignant and relevant, musing about the opinions and feelings of the women mentioned without overstepping the limits of the historical record. Notably, she also focuses on the Tribune's merits and flaws, adding a refreshing nuance that neither oversimplifies nor overly complicates the diaspora and its actions. Corinealdi additionally emphasizes the international role of the paper, which connected local and national issues such as new immigration and citizenship laws to transnational and anti-imperial diasporic communities, asserting Panama as a place of inspiration, reflection, activism, and entrepreneurship valuable to Afro-Caribbean and Black communities globally (Corinealdi 2022, 38). In chronicling the history of the Tribune, Corinealdi simultaneously provides a look at the history of Panama, at the time entrenched in the passage of racist immigration laws aimed at non-Spanish speaking members of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. As Corinealdi provides context for the Panama Canal Zone, a territory legally controlled by the United States, and Western imperial influence that helped shape these policies, she decenters...

Mapping and Taking Academic Turns in Collection History Studies: Reflections on the Issues of the Journal of the History of Collections

This paper translates and collates the contents of all the issues published by the Journal of the History of Collections, one of Oxford University Press Academic Journals, since its inception in 1989. It presents a detailed analysis of changes of article topics or themes in the Journal, based on which this paper demonstrates that the focus of research in this field has undergone three shifts on a decennial basis. By examining collectors’ social identities, motives for collecting, and changes in collection categories, this paper provides important insights into a theoretical framework that sustains the scholarship. It also provides a preliminary overview of current studies on the history of collections in both Chinese and Western academia. This paper seeks to provide some guidance for future explorations of the scholarship.

“Asia as method” as a quest of the spirit and finding we-togetherness: a collaborative autoethnography

This paper responds to the special issue’s call for educators to examine the epistemological and ontological changes that happen to themselves after long-term working abroad and how this experience helps challenge theoretical and pedagogical norms in education. Employing collaborative autoethnography as our research method, we use our life stories of growing up in Asia and studying and working in the West to reflect on our journey of becoming scholars comfortable in engaging Chinese wisdom traditions—Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism—in Western academia. We share how our experiences of encouraging Asian spiritual traditions and engaging in contemplative practices led us to embrace the ontology and epistemology of Eastern wisdom traditions, and come to understand Eastern philosophies as living wisdom, as a way of being and knowing. We further detail how comprehending Eastern philosophies at a heart-mind level has transformed our views on humanity, allowing us to see the common struggles of peoples in the East and West, Asia and North America. Our ontological and epistemological transformations brought about by Eastern contemplative practices have enabled us to see that there is not such a thing as “Asia” or “North America. ” Rather, we interare and we are Earth citizens. We end our inquiry by advocating for the need to engage spirit as method and conduct research and teaching with a heightened sense of we-togetherness, from a heart and mind that is open and boundless, for the benefits of all our relations—visible and invisible, human and more than human.

A sociological (Re)construction of the reflexive self: A convergence between Foucault and classical Confucian ethics

The emergence of a body of work on ethics since the 1990s with a special interest in the self in the Western academia, inspired by Michel Foucault's earlier work, resonates with a concomitant renewed scholarly interest in classical Confucian ethics both in China and internationally. An emphasis on culture and the rejection of a Euro‐centric universalist self in these bodies of work accompanies the disavowal of the very possibility of a generic reflexive self. This article seeks to critically examine the ontological positions on the self of these bodies of work, of Foucault's later thoughts, and of classical Confucian ethics. It is argued that there is a theoretical affinity between Foucault's later thoughts and classical Confucian ethics, with both philosophers acknowledging reflexivity as a universally inherited nature of self and making a special consideration of cultural equality and commonality. The examination includes advocacy for a more nuanced approach to notions of cultural equality that relies on targeted research and intercultural dialogue to avoid any predetermining of cultural differences, to allow better‐informed appreciation of differences, and to develop a more dynamic conceptualization of culture. This article concludes by initiating a discussion about the design of an integrated approach to cultivate reflexivity through training practices that bring together Foucauldian and Confucian ideas.