Purpose: This paper discusses the challenges that two doctoral researchers faced while researching religious minorities and women in a culturally sensitive society such as Pakistan. Their shared interest in sensitive topics related to gender and minorities in Pakistan led both researchers to collaborate in this study to provide a better…

This article foregrounds religious minority youths' subjective experiences of citizenship education in Pakistan to reflect on the relationship between educational curricula and religious exclusion. Drawing on narrative interviews with Hindu, Sikh, and Christian youth in the Punjab province, we demonstrate how sectarian constructions of national…

This paper locates the emergence of critical pedagogy (CP) as praxis in the protest movements in New Delhi, India, against the new citizenship amendment laws that were brought about by the Indian government. The ruling government in India brought amendments to the existing provisions for citizenship, such that persons from Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist,…

This qualitative study analyses the discourses of "Islamic Studies" textbook to problematise its role in schoolchildren's radicalisation, and normalisation of violence, in the post 9/11 situation in the Taliban's stronghold, South Waziristan. The textbook findings are further substantiated by the field data collected from 40 students of…

Islamic education is a central pivot of Pakistan's educational system; it is taught as a separate subject and purposefully included in many other subjects. The State uses Islam to manage public morality and national identity and there is a 'functionalisation' (Starrett, 1998) of religious education. A culturally lived tradition is transformed into…

The textbooks are believed to be containing true and authentic historical narratives and it also remained the sole tool employed by a state to impart a certain notion of its identity. The qualitative perspective best suited this research, and within it, the qualitative content analysis method was chosen to analyze the content of textbooks. This…

As a response to calls for social justice and promotion of children's rights across increasingly diverse communities, the need for 'culturally competent' services to children, families and schools has been identified. The aim of the paper is to explore, for parents of Pakistani minority ethnic heritage in England, the role of culture and religion…

Against the backdrop of growing sociolinguistic interest in transnationalism, this paper uses the notion of "scale" as an "ideological project" (Irvine in "Scale. Discourse and dimensions of social life," University of California Press, California, 2016: 214) to study situated discursive performances of…

The Pakistani Hindu community inhabiting a camp in the city of New Delhi presents the most recent case of South-to-South migration. Migration into India for this community has been undertaken with an aim to achieve a better life, especially one characterized by better education for their children. Education for the families from this community is…

This study explores young students' negotiation of their citizenship identities at the intersection of their class, gender, religious and ethnic identifications in the conflict-affected setting of Pakistan. While much of the global literature on global citizenship education (GCE) primarily takes into account the perspectives of middle-class or…

Young people between the ages of 10 and 19 make up 23% of Pakistan's population. In Pakistan, young people face many challenges in terms of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) issues. These include early marriage and pregnancy, low use of contraception, use of unsafe abortion, lack of relevant information and poor knowledge about bodily…

This study explores the bereavement process and continuing bond in Pakistani Muslims with the focus on how culture and religion influence these processes. Ten participants were interviewed and their transcribed interviews were analyzed using a grounded theory approach. Three main domains were identified from the narratives expressed by the…

The study reported in this article is part of a wider research project on the adaptation of South Asians in Britain. It examines and compares the acculturation attitudes and cultural identity of Indian and Pakistani second-generation adolescents Indian (Punjabi Sikh and Gujarati Hindu) and Pakistani (Muslim) in Britain. The research project…

This article describes how Bruce Hoffman and Marc Sageman, two prominent scholars of terrorism, square off over whether Al Qaeda remains the primary global terrorist threat. The dispute began in the pages of "Foreign Affairs," where Hoffman, a professor in the security-studies program at Georgetown University, wrote a withering review of…

Since the 1980s the mission of the national citizenship education curriculum in Pakistan has been the Islamization of society. The government curriculum guidelines require textbooks to emphasize Islam as the national ideology of the state of Pakistan. Recognizing the deleterious effect of an exclusivist curriculum on the civic unity of the nation,…