Indiana University Press Journals Weblog

Women in Music Education

Women in Music Education is the focus of the latest issue of Philosophy of Music Education Review. In “Women and the Work of Music Education,” the focus of volume 17. number 2, the fall 2009 issue of Philosophy of Music Education Review, women’s perspectives on the situations in which labor are examined.  As Estelle Jorgensen, the editor of the journal, asserts in her introduction to the issue, “[T]he work performed by women is often under-appreciated, if appreciated at all, and they are rendered invisible when they focus on those things that are important to them but may not be regarded as significant by the gatekeepers of the profession….[T]heir work is often conducted on the fringes of what is regarded as most significant by the field.”  The contributors to the issue posit divergent approaches to the work of music education. The lead article by Julia Eklund Koza, “My Body Had a Mind of Its Own: On Teaching, the Illusion of Control, and the Terrifying Limits of Governmentality,” is the first of a two-part study. In part one, she examines the moments in which the body seems out of control and in which “bodies seem to have minds of their own.” In addition, she addresses the lack of materials on issues of power and governance, considers the “limits of power and the incompleteness of control of either self or of others,” and suggests that the notions of control that dominate educational discourse are problematic and limiting.

In “Women Working in Music Education: The War Machine,” Elizabeth Gould describes the implications for university women when they challenge the prevailing beliefs and practices of academe. Alexandra Kertz-Welzel, in “Philosophy of Music Education and the Burnout Syndrome: Female Viewpoints on a Male School World,” considers the issue of female fatigue in a male-dominated environment and its resultant loss of teachers.

Other articles in the issue include Sondra Wieland Howe on “A Historical View of Women in Music Education Careers,” an examination of the invisibility of women in the historical record; and June Boyce-Tillman on “The Transformative Qualities of a Limited Space Created by Musicking,” an analysis of the transformative power of luminal spaces in musicking. Closing the issue is Mary J. Reichling’s review of Robert E. Innis’ Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind, which was published in 2009 by Indiana University Press, a review of particular significance to this issue of PMER because Langer’s philosophy concerning feeling is considered by some of her critics as “soft” and beneath serious philosophical notice.
For order a subscription to the journal or to purchase a copy of “Women and the Work of Music Education,” please click here. 

Iranian Jewish Women

Cover Illustration: Parvin Schmueli Buchnik, “The Hands”

Special Issue: Nashim 18

Consulting Editor Farideh Dayanim Goldin

Research into lives and cultures of Iranian Jewish women is relatively new. Information gathering on Iranian Jewish life accelerated after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the mass exodus of Iranian Jews from their ancient homeland. Jewish existence in Iran, some researchers believe, dates back to the destruction of the First Temple, the Babylonian Exile, and the freedom granted the Jews in 539 BCE by the king of Persia, Cyrus the Great. Others assert that Jews settled in Persia (Media) earlier in two waves of exodus from the Holy Land in 727 BC and 721 BC, during the Assyrian rule. Even though Iranian Jewish population shrank from 100,000 before the Revolution to approximately 20,000 in 2009, Iran still hosts the largest numbers of Jews in the Middle East outside Israel.

The Islamic Revolution accelerated the pace of research, information gathering and recording data about the Iranian Jewish culture that many scholars feared could be soon lost. The resulting series of books on Iranian Jews do include some information about women, their lives, cultures, and lifestyle. They foster a sense of pride and appreciation in the earlier generations’ resiliency and cultural achievements

Examining this new scholarship, I personally have learned  to appreciate my own heritage, and to reclaim it. In my research and in my personal life, I now look for wonders of the Iranian Jewish life that had been bestowed upon me. Once, I believed that my grandmother Tavous was a superstitious woman because she was illiterate; now I know that her wisdom was beyond any formal education;  and I regret that I don’t have the knowledge of her herbal remedies. Through her recollections, she taught me the history of the Jews of Shiraz as well as the art of storytelling.

It is my hope that the collection of essays in this issue of Nashim, devoted to Iranian Jewish women, will intensify this  sense of connection and appreciation of Iranian Jewish heritage, that it will spark and intensify further scholarly work, and that it will help to create a network among the scholars of Iranian Jewish women.

Arab families, gender, war and transnationalism

JMEWS 5.3 Special Issue — War and Transnational Arab Families

Available in Fall of 2009

This special double issue of JMEWS reframes the study of Arab families and the complex interweaving of gender relations within them in the context of two major dynamics – war and transnationalism. The issue represents the publication of the first empirical research results of the Arab Families Working Group, a network of 15 scholars who have worked together since 2001 to carry out critical comparative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary research on Arab youth and families in Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, and their diasporas in the United States and Canada.  

War and transnationalism are shaping not only the Arab world but the globe. In conversation, consultation, and comparative research, the seven contributors to this volume have been engaged in an intellectual project to understand how the site of “Arab families” – whether as social institution or social imaginary, statist project, discourse, trope of modernity, or tradition, or in their multiple lived realities –  allows new understandings of the conflicts and contradictions besetting the region. The articles carry out critical historical and comparative and empirical research to offer new theoretical frameworks for problematizing Arab families and youth. The articles track the genealogy of domestic service in war-torn Lebanon for over half a century; analyze the transformation of the cultural politics of weddings in Palestine between the two Intifada’s; evaluate the consequences of repeated displacement on women and youth in Beirut and its suburbs; assess the impact on household decision making on the international migration of male household heads in Lebanon; identify the reaction of Arab Americans (especially Lebanese Americans) in Detroit to the 2006 war on Lebanon; and document the transformation of notions of citizenship and child socialization among transnational Lebanese families in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Ottawa, Canada. The authors’ empirically-rich projects offer complementary investigations into “the family” as constantly re-invented in the context of state projects in crisis, border crossings, global transformations, and failed modernisms.

The Arab Families Working Group’s empirical and theoretical projects can be browsed on the AFWG website, http://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu/afwg/. For more information on AFWG, contact AFWG facilitator at sjoseph@ucdavis.edu.

JMEWS 5.3 SPECIAL ISSUE War and Transnational Arab Families

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION, Penny Johnson and Suad Joseph 

ESSAYS

Weddings and War: Marriage Arrangements and Celebrations in Two Palestinian Intifadas, Penny Johnson, Lamis Abu Nahleh, and Annelies Moors

The Politics of Group Weddings in Palestine: Political and Gender Tensions, Islah Jad

Displaced Arab Families: Mothers’ Voices on Living and Coping in Postwar Beirut, Jihad Makhoul and Mary Ghanem

In the Shadows of Family Life: Toward a History of Domestic Service in Lebanon, Ray Jureidini

Male Migration and the Lebanese Family: The Impact on the Wife Left Behind, Mona Chemali Khalaf

Geographies of Lebanese Families: Women as Transnationals, Men as Nationals, and Other Problems with Transnationalism, Suad Joseph

Transnational Families Under Siege: Lebanese Shi‘a in Dearborn, Michigan, and the 2006 War on Lebanon, Nadine Naber 

BRIEF COMMUNICATIONS

Women’s Memory Symposium: Women’s Library and Information Center, Istanbul, Diane James

Violence That Bleeds Borders: Transnational Engagement in the Women in Conflict Zones Symposium, Naazneen Diwan

BOOK REVIEWS

Nefissa Naguib, Women, Water and Memory: Recasting Lives in Palestine, Reviewed by Rana Sharif

Iman Humaydan Younes, Wild Mulberries, B as in Beirut, Reviewed by Maya Mikdashi

Susan Weiss wins "Women in Law" award

Jerusalem lawyer, Susan Weiss is one of the contributors in the newly published issue of Nashim 17. We have just learned that Susan was awarded this year’s “Women in Law” citation by the Israel Bar Association, at a ceremonial dinner held on June 2 in Eilat.

Susan Weiss is the founder and executive director of the Center for Women’s Justice in Jerusalem, which is committed to advancing the rights of women to equality, dignity and justice under Jewish law.

You can check out their website at www.cwj.org.il.

Susan's contribution to Nashim 17 is Under Cover: Demystification of Women's Head Covering in Jewish Law and can be found in Nashim's newest special issue titled: Sexuality in Jewish Contexts.

Memory-work

SPECIAL ISSUE History and Memory 20.2 Fall/Winter 2008
Remembering and Forgetting on Europe's Southern Periphery

INTRODUCTION: Time, Materiality, and the Work of Memory
Yannis Hamilakis and Jo Labanyi

One of the editors of this volume (Yannis Hamilakis) recently returned from archaeological fieldwork at the Sanctuary of Poseidon on the Greek island of Poros. The site contains an ancient stone block, from one of the buildings that surrounded the temple. In the early twentieth century a large extended family settled amid the ruins. The children of the family inscribed their initials on this and other blocks, noting their age and the date. Nearby, at the Athenian Acropolis, there is an architectural fragment from the classical temple of Erechtheion, onto which an inscription in Arabic script was carved in 1805, when the Acropolis was under Ottoman rule and used as a fortress. These two artifacts, reworked through human labor, evoke some of our central concerns in this issue, relating to memory, time, materiality, and practice. They speak of time as co-existence rather than succession. And they embody memory materially as duration. They also show us that memory is about human labor: memory-work. This volume explores these concepts, together with forgetting (also seen as a social practice), and the interplay between autobiographical memories and official memories, and between tradition and modernity.
We focus on regions at the western and eastern ends of the Mediterranean that are united by their self-perception, or castigation by others, as being situated on Europe’s periphery. We have wanted to show how these regions’ specific social and historical conditions, and their legacies and redeployment, have resulted in distinctive ways of dealing with time, history and materiality, some shared with other areas of the world, some perhaps not. In addition to Portugal and Spain, the Greek island of Kalymnos,  Smyrna/Izmir in present-day Turkey, and Cyprus, the volume discusses memory work in a Macedono-Bulgarian community in Pennsylvania. Topics include monumental sites, childhood memories of institutionalization and invasion, legal disputes, food and lifestyle, and school textbooks. By thinking of memory as a practice—a re-working—we have wanted to stress that memory’s strength is its capacity to change the past.

 

Fig. 1. An ancient block from the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Poros, Greece with twentieth-century graffiti. Photo by Yannis Hamilakis.

 

Fig. 2. An ancient architectural fragment from the Erechtheion on the Acropolis of Athens, with a nineteenth-century inscription. Photo by Fotis Ifantidis; reproduced by kind permission of the photographer.

How Victorians Thought and Felt

Victorian Studies 50:3
Special Issue: Victorian Emotions / Guest Editor: Rachel Ablow

The emotions provide an especially appropriate subject for a journal committed to interdisciplinary inquiry. Those diverse feelings and sensations commonly grouped together as “the emotions” almost invariably fall between apparently stable domains--whether of the physiological and the psychological, the individual and the social, or the human and the nonhuman. As a result, they challenge the stability and autonomy of those categories, as well as the separability of the historical and literary tools we ordinarily use to understand them.

Despite the wide range of disciplines and fields that have recently been engaged in work on the emotions, Victorianists possess a privileged relation to the subject. The nineteenth century is often described as the moment when the emotions were domesticated. Yet as the essays in this issue demonstrate, the emotions continued to function as a central epistemological tool throughout the Victorian era.

Each of the essays published in our special issue takes up this question of the epistemological function of the emotions; they reveal how emotional experience could be used to define, reproduce, and ultimately reify central social, political, and scientific categories, but they also expand our sense of the kinds of emotions that constitute important objects of study. Jed Mayer examines how both vivisectionists and antivivisectionists used compassion to differentiate between human and nonhuman animals, while Joanna Bourke shows how marital advice manuals used love and lust to define male and female, healthy and unhealthy. Richard Higgins demonstrates how H. G. Wells used recklessness and desire to distinguish between those able to escape social expectations and those bound by them. Grace Kehler demonstrates how social reformers used anxiety, disgust, and repulsion to maintain a supposedly healthy distance between potential philanthropists and their impoverished objects, and Adela Pinch shows us how Victorian poetry imagines the feeling of thinking about the object of feeling.

Innovative Women:
Unsung Pioneers of Social Change

This special issue, guest edited by Nikki Keddie, points to the originality and importance of women who pioneered in major areas of social change and whose contributions have not been recognized. Indeed, most are scarcely known in their own societies or in the West.

Powerful men sometimes appropriated their ideas, often erasing their originators' names from history; sometimes rejected these ideas; and sometimes ignored them. Yet many of these ideas were later accepted, and some are still on the agenda. As Baron has noted regarding Egypt, many such women, whose ideas were practical and based on experience, deserve the kind of attention usually accorded almost exclusively to male writers. The popularity in the West of Middle Eastern and North African women's memoirs, films, novels, and other contributions is another side of the growing recognition of such women's importance and influence, a recognition to which this issue gives added impetus.

The articles in this issue deal with prostitution and marriage (A. Holly Shissler), birth control (Beth Baron), women's education (Jasamin Rostan-Kolayi), and the expression of feelings related to gender and sexuality (Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi). Three of the articles deal in significant part with women who contested traditional ideas and practices concerning sexuality and women's bodies; all four of the articles feature women who broke with traditional ideas and mores and presented alternative views of women.

The special issue is based on papers presented at a workshop on New Ideas for Middle Eastern Societies: Analyzing Women's Writings, held at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2007. The chief sponsor was the fund created to support three years' postdoctoral fellowships from the International Balzan Foundation Prize, awarded to Nikki Keddie, with several co-sponsors including the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. Three of the authors: A. Holly Shissler, Jasamin Rostam-Kolayi, and Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi, were Keddie/Balzan Fellows in 2005-07.