The Fashionable Muslim is a story about pragmatism, but not obviously so. It’s also a story about how too much is choice as opposed to too little choice can be a major cause of scepticism.

The aim of this study has been to investigate a group of upper secondary school teachers’ approach to work with the ethnic multi-culturalism that characterises the Swedish society of today and to point to the obstacles and possibilities the teachers see to work with this. With the help of interviews with eight teachers satisfying results could be reached. The results showed that it was possible to distinguish three different ways to think and act when it comes to the work with ethnic multi-culturalism in school and teaching. The approaches entailed different consequences on the way the teachers conduct their teaching. It was also shown that the teachers experience that there are more obstacles than possibilities to work with ethnic multi-culturalism. However, the obstacles that were pointed-out, for example lack of time, are all possible to overcome.

<p>The aim of this study has been to investigate a group of upper secondary school teachers’ approach to work with the ethnic multi-culturalism that characterises the Swedish society of today and to point to the obstacles and possibilities the teachers see to work with this. With the help of interviews with eight teachers satisfying results could be reached. The results showed that it was possible to distinguish three different ways to think and act when it comes to the work with ethnic multi-culturalism in school and teaching. The approaches entailed different consequences on the way the teachers conduct their teaching. It was also shown that the teachers experience that there are more obstacles than possibilities to work with ethnic multi-culturalism. However, the obstacles that were pointed-out, for example lack of time, are all possible to overcome.</p>

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FACULTY OF HUMANITIES School of Literature and Language Studies 9511112w mokope@webmail.co.za / The scourge of HIV/AIDS continues to worsen in the country in spite of efforts made by government and other stakeholders to combat this disease. This is reflected by the everincreasing statistics of new cases of HIV infection that are reported every minute. This rate of infection is believed to be influenced by factors such as cultural constructions that inhibit efforts to educate the populace about the disease. The research focuses on the extent to which cultural ideologies, as reflected in figurative expressions, render the task of educating people about sexually related diseases difficult. Translators seem to prefer figurative instead of literal language when they translate STDs and AIDS-related education materials. The preference of the former renders the message inaccessible to the average target audience. This study neither strives to conscientise and sensitise the doubting Thomases about the danger of HIV/AIDS and STDs nor does it seek a cure or treatment but a new way of communicating about these diseases. Ratzan maintains that “until a vaccine or cure for HIV infection is discovered, communication is all that we have” (1990: 257). This study deals with communication about HIV/AIDS. It is believed that the research’s findings can be used to help reduce the rate of transmission of this life-threatening infectious disease.

Révélée dans les années 70, la génération des Novísimos éclipse des décennies d’asphyxie culturelle en brisant les carcans formels et les codes langagiers. Si une forme de liquidation semble être à l’œuvre, très vite la culture du silence et du vide offre un terrain fertile à la renaissance. Guillermo Carnero, Leopoldo María Panero et Jaime Siles, réunis autour de l’objectif de rénovation poétique, modulent un dialogue continu avec la poésie française, inspirés par la modernité de la fin du XIXe siècle et ses artisans : Baudelaire, Gautier, Mallarmé et Rimbaud. Mosaïque culturelle, le poème fait se rencontrer tableaux et vers, rythme et couleur, mais aussi se confronter les références les plus érudites, l’entremêlement des idiomes, et des motifs populaires. Cette démultiplication du sens conduit à une parole poétique qui touche à l’universel ; entraînant la remise en question du poème et de ses acteurs. Dans cette œuvre médiatrice des arts et des cultures, une révolution est en marche. / Coming to light in the 1970s, the Novísimos generation eclipses many decades of cultural suffocation by breaking formal constraint and linguistic codes. If a certain form of liquidation seems to be initially at work, the culture of silence and emptiness soon provides fertile ground for rebirth. Gathered around the common goal of poetic renewal, Guillermo Carnero, Leopoldo María Panero and Jaime Siles are in constant dialogue with French poets, more precisely with late nineteenth-century Modernists such as Baudelaire, Gautier, Mallarmé and Rimbaud. As a sort of cultural mosaic, the poem not only brings together paintings and verses, rhythm and colour, but also confronts the most erudite references with the intermingling of idioms and popular elements. This multiplication of meanings leads to a poetic language that attains universality and questions the poem and its main players. In this intermediary work between arts and cultures, a revolution is underway.

Contemporary sex therapy, as a social location within which interventions are made in the field of human sexuality, constitutes a terminal point through which discourses of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality interface and become meditated. It is also a site in which the particular outcomes of this mediation can be expected to have a significant bearing upon clients who, as social and sexual subjects, carry diverse racialised and ethnicised identities. Though a substantial literature exists pertaining to classical sexology, relatively little is sociologically known about contemporary sex therapy within the UK, and nothing is known of the manner in which discourses of race and ethnicity operate within the field. This exploratory research examines the discourses produced by sex therapists (both in talk and text) regarding the nature and significance of race and ethnicity, and the substantive qualities, significance and effects attributed to these in shaping patterns of human sexuality, sexual dysfunction and sex therapy. The aim is to analyse and account for these discourses as the products of underlying cognitive models of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, as these have evolved within the particular social location of sex therapy (as a deposit of a broader racialised and ethnicised social consciousness), and formed the basis of an active utilisation by therapists in the pursuit of `preferred renditions' of sex therapy practice. The thesis also aims to explore sex therapists' accounts of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the achievement of effective, equitable and non-oppressive therapeutic intervention in a context of racial and ethnic diversity. The research supports a rendition of sex therapy as a complex constituency, struggling to make sense of the nature and significance of race and ethnicity as sources of difference, and as dimensions of the social subject. Liberal-humanistic, biological-essentialist and versions of ethnic essentialism compete and coalesce as the primary elements of sex therapists' constructions of race and ethnicity as dimensions of the gendered sexual subject, informing their accounts of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the delivery of appropriate, sensitive and non-oppressive praxis.

Le 11 septembre 2001, les États-Unis vivaient un traumatisme majeur qui engendra des questionnements sur l’image des Américains dans le monde et plus particulièrement dans le monde arabo-musulman. Cet intérêt croissant est au cœur de ce travail doctoral qui s’intéresse à l’image des États-Unis en Égypte à travers la presse d’expression anglaise et la culture populaire égyptienne de 1991 à 2008. L’Égypte avait déjà commencé à explorer sa relation avec les États-Unis bien avant notre période d’étude mais il y a eu une recrudescence de cet intérêt avec la guerre du Golfe (1990-1991), le processus de paix sous l’égide de Bill Clinton (1991-2000) et l’invasion de l’Irak en 2003. En effet, l’implication croissante des États-Unis dans la région du Proche Orient occasionne une réception complexe qui mérite un examen minutieux. Cette thèse retrace l’historique de cette image dès les premiers contacts pour arriver à esquisser les différents courants qui influent sur la réception des États-Unis en Égypte et jusqu’à un certain degré, dans le monde arabe, en raison du rayonnement culturel de l’Égypte dans la région. / On 9/11 the United States suffered a major trauma which raised questions as to its image abroad, and particularly, in the Arab and Muslim worlds. This ever-increasing interest lies at the heart of our dissertation which focuses on the image of the United States in Egypt from 1991 to 2008, as seen and spread through the English-language press and more specifically, the newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly, as well as through Egyptian popular culture. Egypt had already begun to explore its relationship with the United States well before the period under study, but the Gulf War (1990-1991), the peace process under the leadership of Bill Clinton (1991-2000) and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 revived this interest. Indeed, the United States’ deepening involvement in Middle Eastern issues had led to complex responses that deserve scrutiny. After tracing the history of the image of the United States in Egypt since the first contacts, this dissertation analyzes the ups and downs of the perception of the United States in Egypt between 1990 and 2008, and to some extent, in the Arab world, on account of the cultural influence of Egypt in the region.

Following the publication of Simone de Beauvoir's influential book, The Second Sex, (1949), many feminist critics in Europe and North America have discussed the problems facing women artists and critics of working within phallocentric and phallo-symbolic culture and language. Simone de Beauvoir was the first to demonstrate how male-dominated culture has used symbolic language in order to exclude, repress, and objectify women. Language is one of the key mechanisms employed in phallocentric culture to define and construct reality and gender identity according to male experience and desire. Feminist critics writing since the 1950s,. have been examining the ways in which women might find or develop a language through which they can express their own experience of reality, gender identity, sexual desire and pleasure. Many contemporary women writers and film-makers have appropriated the representations of female desire and sexuality that pervade male-dominated western culture, deconstructing and subverting them in order to create innovative and challenging representations of their own. They refer to, and draw upon, the traditional imagery and conventions of classic Hollywood cinema, using such references to serve their own ends and create their own meanings. They have also radically deconstructed and reappropriated stereotypical pornographic images, exploring the possibility of creating a female-oriented, woman-centred, non-misogynous erotica. Women working in the fields of literature and film are attempting to explore and develop alternative representations of female desire and gender identities, experimenting with new vocabularies of representation in order to explore women's perceptions of their multiple identities and their experience of themselves as desiring subjects. They have taken some of the most negative representations of women constructed by phallocentric culture, and reappropriated them in order to create innovative, alternative forms of representation and a radical critique of the social construction of "femininity" and gender identity.

Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, theories of race contributed to the justification and authorization of global European imperialism and the colonization of indigenous people. In Canada, racial theories influenced perceptions of each citizen as either superior or inferior. Although European and American theorists constructed hundreds of ideas about race, there are several key ideas that continue to linger in the minds of Canadians. This thesis examines the socio-ideological context of racial theories and provides an historical account of the construction of race. The historical account highlights four prominent ideas: white superiority, non-white inferiority (marked by low intelligence levels), the belief in inherent racial characteristics, and racial purity and contamination. In Saskatchewan, these ideas continue to surface in discourse about Aboriginal people and relations between the non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal population. Although constructed ideas about race are scientifically unsound and grounded in the belief in white superiority, these ideas are often normalized as common sense and not easily recognized as constructed. Discourse and practices that appear to be emancipatory for Aboriginal people but rely on constructed ideas about race need to be re-examined. This thesis provides several examples of where these ideas surface in Saskatchewan discourse and recommends anti-racist education as an alternative.