Suchergebnisse

Public debate around cultural diversity has been dominated by a focus on 'panicked multiculturalism' – those spaces which have been subject to social anxieties because of perceived conflicts around ethnicity. This article attempts to address the habitual ways cultural differences are transacted and reconciled in the daily conduct of people in culturally diverse settings. Although habit has been a central category for understanding racial prejudice, it has rarely impacted on an understanding of the practices and capacities which people develop for living with difference, the routinised 'civic virtues' of intercultural life. Cosmopolitanism and conviviality have become significant tools in framing this enquiry, though not without problems. The issue for this article is whether these terms are methodologically useful for the analysis of the habits of 'civic virtues'. This article, drawing on the everyday interactions in and around a school, argues that we need to conceptualise conviviality as an object of empirical research. This requires that we think about habit as a pedagogical process, and the temporal and spatial elements through which 'cosmopolitan' behaviours are habituated.

The 'face of evil' has become a recurring image in recent years in accounts of international terrorism. Yet it has also become a frequent figure in debates around 'ethnic crime' and 'race rape'. It is a motif that demonstrates the ethnicisation of a moralised discourse of good and evil, particularly in the face of religious fundamentalism and moral panic around men of Arabic or Muslim background. The physicality of evil is often obscured in abstract discussions of moral panic. The face of evil 'fixes' evil in terms of a certain appearance and manner that are evidence of a deeper 'truth' of moral danger.

Disposed to Learn explores the relationship between ethnicity and dispositions towards learning, with a focus on primary school students of Chinese, Pasifika and Anglo Australian backgrounds. The authors challenge the tendency towards the essentializing of ethnicity within multiculturalism to argue for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between culture and academic performance. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, they examine how home and school practices produce particular attributes that are embodied as dispositions towards learning - the scholarly habitus. These home and school p