Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia

This paper is about place making in Jerusalem, an important city at the heart of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. It examines how place making in Jerusalem has had the consequence of shifting what...

Making Place: The Shifting Green Line and the Development of “Greater” Metropolitan Jerusalem

My thesis creates a comparative framework for understanding representations of Jewishness in Jewish, postcolonial, and Palestinian literature in response to particular historical events such as the Holocaust, the creation of the state of Israel, the first intifada, and the siege of Ramallah during the second intifada Central to my study is the shift from Jewish identity in Europe before the creation of Jewish settlements in Palestine – as a minority identity in the Diaspora, facing discrimination and persecution in Europe, which culminated in the Holocaust – to Jewishness as Israeliness, defined in relation to the state of Israel, Zionism, and settler-colonialism 
My study contests ahistorical and decontextualised uses of Jewishness and each chapter proposes a different angle to engage with ideas of Jewishness in their specific historical context I examine narrative fiction and travelogues, published between 1971 and 2008, by Jurek Becker, Anita Desai, David Grossman, Shulamith Hareven, Edgar Hilsenrath, Sahar Khalifeh, Caryl Phillips, Anton Shammas, Raja Shehadeh, and A B Yehoshua Through these examples, I interrogate the political and stylistic reasons underlying the inclusion and appropriation of ideas of Jewishness in literature I suggest that literature offers alternative models of Jewishness which question received notions of Jewish victimhood and powerlessness By determining the ways in which ideas associated with Jewishness travel across different geographical locations and examining adaptations of these concepts in non-Jewish contexts, I illustrate the centrality of ideas of Jewishness in the construction and definition of identities for both Jewish and non-Jewish writers and readers and indicate the global ramifications of engaging with Jewishness for contemporary literature and culture

The Outsider Inside: Ideas of Jewishness in Contemporary Jewish, Postcolonial, and Palestinian Literature

This article explores the dynamic of the Palestinian legal struggle for equal educational opportunities in Israel. It examines the tension between the Palestinians’ positions on equality, on one hand, and the way the Israeli legal system seems to define equality, on the other hand. The article argues that the Israeli legal system seems to adopt a narrow formal view on educational equality for Palestinian children, a view that is not liable to bring about societal transformation.

Law and Education Critical Perspectives on Arab Palestinian Education in Israel

My aim in this thesis is to show that there exists a fundamental ‘moral tension’ between the ostensible goals of environmental education on the one hand and the politicization of China’s ideology of power and obsession with global economic dominance on the other. This moral tension is particularly evident in the case of the Chinese Three Gorges Dam Project (TGDP), where the unresolved collision of these conflicting value presumptions has led to massive ecological degradation on the one hand and issues of social injustice associated with population dislocation on the other. Although considerable engineering planning by the government has gone into the construction of what is claimed to be the most energy productive and largest dam project in the world, its horrific legacy of decimation to the surrounding land and water environments has been catastrophic. Similarly, the forced dislocation of so huge a population of local people (now called ‘reservoir refugees’, at least 1.3 million people based on the official figures) makes clear that the humanitarian ramifications of the TGDP were hopelessly unanticipated, or based upon epistemological presumptions which served to marginalize their moral importance. The Three Gorges Dam (TGD) is politically applauded for several innovations, three of which I wish to draw to the reader’s attention. First, it is hailed as being the largest dam in the world, and second, it is touted as being capable of producing far more ‘safe’ energy than any of the other major dams scattered around the globe. Last but not least, it has unashamedly been exalted with pride as the most expensive construction project of any kind in the world. The question I pose is whether the price that has been paid and is still now being paid in terms of environmental destruction, humanitarian suffering, and ‘cultural genocide’ as I shall call it, are prices far too high to pay. Although the full environmental consequences and social justice issues raised by the TGDP have due to political reasons, not been teased out sufficiently in the Chinese public arena, I shall argue that the deleterious environmental and social impacts of the TGDP are incontestable and can better be understood as representing the inevitable outcome of a misguided epistemology of power and control driven by a political ideology within which values issues of social injustice, equity, and environmental stewardship have been irrevocably compromised. The main body of my thesis will be concerned to reflect critically on this moral tension between environmental education and the political epistemology and ideology of power which challenges it. Once this first major task has been completed, I will then propose a more comprehensive framework of theory and praxis grounded in an environmental pedagogy of ‘empathetic epistemology’ within which the moral issues raised can be treated with serious educational consideration and respect. This thesis thus endeavors to provide a new vision of our relationship to nature which is sponsored on the epistemic insight that the spiritual quality of our own existence cannot be defined independently of the moral integrity of our relationship to nature.

Philosophical reflections on the importance of a values-based program of environmental education, with special reference to the pedagogy of empathetic educaton

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Field Report: Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel

Ghana's Slaves to the Gods

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China’s Three Gorges: The Impact of Dam Construction onEmerging Human Rights

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Sarah C. Aird

Papers

Field Report: Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel

Ghana's Slaves to the Gods

China’s Three Gorges: The Impact of Dam Construction onEmerging Human Rights

The War of Attrition in Chiapas