SSRC Work and Experts Related to

Europe

Features and Press Releases

October 2^nd 2009: SSRC Announces Winners of 2010 Book Fellowships
December 8^th 2008: This Classroom Doesn't Love a Wall
The award-winning French film The Class follows a year in the life of a French schoolteacher working at junior high school in a tough neighborhood in Paris. Does it help to explain why France’s educational system has proved so resistant to multiculturalism? We asked anthropologist John Bowen for an appraisal. He wrote a chapter on this theme for the SSRC-sponsored volume Just Schools.
February 15^th 2008: New Freedoms in Turkey—for Whom?
In a new feature for SSRC.org, we round up our blog postings on current events, beginning with the Immanent Frame's coverage of the latest flaring of Europe's head scarf controversy, this time in Turkey. Princeton's Joan Wallach Scott warns against conflating secularism with equal rights for women, while social anthropologist Jenny White says that head scarves are a kind of red herring that keep us from examining the best ways for liberal democracies to treat special interests. (Also included: Postings on universities and open access in Knowledge Rules, and on Chad in Making Sense of Darfur.)
February 14^th 2008: Human Rights for the Few, Not the Many
Anthopologist Miriam Ticktin embedded herself in a state medical office and a refugee appeals commission in France to study the movement by undocumented immigrants -- les sans-papiers -- for basic human rights. She discovered that very few were granted asylum, and those few who succeeded were almost always construed as exceptional victims. Most exceptional of all were Muslim women who had suffered abuse.
June 18^th 2007: Estonia: The Mouse That Roared?
In today's interconnected world, minor events in the world's lesser-known regions can have major geopolitical consequences. According to former Eurasia Program committee member Robert Kaiser, this is precisely what happened when Estonia, a tiny Baltic state, decided to relocate a Soviet war memorial that for many years had stood in its capital city. Kaiser argues that moving the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn had the effect not only of chilling Estonia's relations with Russia still further but also of reviving cold war thinking and rhetoric in the European Union and the United States.; All news items related to Europe