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The identities of Muslim women tend to be essentialized into binaries of what she is and what she ought to be (Golnaraghi & Dye, 2016). For far too long Muslim women’s voices in North America have been marginalized by hegemonic Orientalist (Said, 1978) and traditionalist (Clarke, 2003) Islamic discourses. When it comes to issues of agency, empowerment, and self-expression, it is either imposed by Western ideals or regulated by traditionalist politics of Islam (Zine, 2006). As such, Muslim women activists must engage and negotiate within the dual and narrow oppressions of Orientalist and traditionalist Islamic representations of her (Khan, 1998; Zine, 2006). Given the scarcity of space provided in print media (Golnaraghi & Dye, 2016; Golnaraghi & Mills, 2013) for Muslim women to construct, appropriate, and remake their own identities, some have turned to social media to challenge these dichotomies through activism and resistance. Such a space is necessary in order to recover, resurface, and reauthorize the hybrid voices, experiences, and identities of the Muslim woman on their own terms in order to challenge hegemonic discourse. Highlighting the nuances of feminist activism, particularly that of Muslim postcolonial feminists that can make a difference to Critical Management Studies (CMS) as a community concerned with social justice and challenging marginalization and oppression. The “Somewhere in America #Mipsterz” (Muslim hipsters) video launched in 2013, the site for our critical discourse analysis, is one case where this resistance can be seen, showcasing fashionable veiled Muslim women artistically expressing themselves to the beats of Jay Z.

So-called classical sociology took shape during perhaps the high point of a world dominated by imperial states. In the “west” the British, French, and German empires, along with a surging America, claimed political and sometimes territorial control over wide stretches of the globe. Beyond Europe and the United States, while the Ottoman and Qing empires were in there last days, new states were staking out their imperial claims such as Japan and Russia. The tension between a reality of empire and an ideal of sovereign nation-states eventually exploded in WWI. Curiously, much of this dynamic, especially the global power of empire, went theoretically unnoticed by the makers of modern sociology. This chapter explores this theme through a sketch of the failure of this theoretical reckoning in Marx, Weber, and Durkheim.

Many academics have, as of late, shown commitment to decolonising academic research and/or have (re-)educated themselves, at least to some extent, on Indigenous epistemologies, methodologies and methods. While these efforts seem commendable, they may lead to tenacious expectations by some senior academics that new and emerging Indigenous scholars must use Indigenous research tools when conducting decolonising research with their communities. However, such expectations can create ethical issues in instances where the use of Indigenous research tools may be inappropriate or even harmful due to the ongoing impact of deep colonisation in the community. Such counterproductive expectations also disempower emerging Indigenous researchers as they undermine the researcher’s knowledge of what is and is not appropriate in their communities. In this autoethnographic account, an Indigenous knowledgemaker and her non-Indigenous academic mentor jointly reflect on the tightrope walk between meeting academic expectations and contributing to the decolonisation of Indigenous communities in meaningful, non-harmful ways. Drawing on Edward Said (1979, 2004), we contemplate whether the increasing dissemination of Indigenous scholarship has generated a type of ‘academic neo-orientalism’ that is characterised by academic outsiders exoticising emerging Indigenous scholars in various research matters and thus re-colonise (perhaps contrary to their sincere intentions) Indigenous scholarship.

What is “postcolonial sociology”? While the study of postcoloniality has taken on the form of “postcolonial theory” in the humanities, sociology's approach to postcolonial issues has been comparably muted. This essay considers postcolonial theory in the humanities and its potential utility for reorienting sociological theory and research. After sketching the historical background and context of postcolonial studies, three broad areas of contribution to sociology are highlighted: reconsiderations of agency, the injunction to overcome analytic bifurcations, and a recognition of sociology's imperial standpoint.

This chapter reviews postcolonialism praxis. Based on the examination of postcolonialism practices, this chapter details why postcolonialism offers nothing different than colonialism despite administrative and bureaucratic changes when colonizers left the colonized territories physically.

With the increased flow of Syrian Muslim refugees entering new places such as Scotland, attention has been given to Syrians’ adaptation to their new settings. This chapter explores refugee parents’ roles in mediating their children’s educational experiences. The study is informed by theory of identity (Hall, 1996), Orientalism (Said, 1978), framing (Bernstein, 2000), and hegemony in curriculum (Apple, 2004). Snowball sampling was used to recruit participants in Glasgow. Semi-structured interviews and vignettes were used to generate data with 12 parents and 12 school-aged children in 12 refugee families. The chapter explores how these families have encountered new aspects of their education, such as different pedagogy and Eurocentric curriculum. By examining the participants’ various ways of dealing with these aspects, the chapter explores educational challenges that did not exist before their displacement, demonstrates the inherent diversity within refugee populations, and conceptualizes their negotiation with new contingencies using Hall’s concept of identity as a relational and contingent process.

This special issue aims to address the complexities and dynamics in contemporary China’s citizen-making processes, with a focus on the educational dimension.

The four articles in this special issue present citizen-making processes in both educational and cultural arenas. Based on the rich, first-hand data collected inside and outside China, the researchers revealed the dynamics of the educative processes, as the interplay of different mechanisms produces new understandings of citizenship practice.

This special issue sheds light on the rise of new types of citizens, who are emerging at the grassroots level in China, beyond the state’s strict direct regulations, along with the rise of market forces and multicultural communities in Chinese society today. Contributors to this special issue have captured an ongoing change, in that the diversified citizen-making mechanisms are, to a certain extent, mitigating the party-state’s definitive monopoly on forging citizens and are creating new spaces for individuals to develop fresh forms of political subjectivity and citizenship practice. In this sense, we argue for the unpacking of the citizen-making processes in present-day China not only from the lens of state-dominated, top-down initiatives but also from that of participatory, bottom-up initiatives performed by grassroots groups with differentiated socio-economic statuses and cultural traditions.

This special issue can be regarded as a contribution to the growing field of Chinese citizenship studies, which constitutes an integral part of the unfinished project of citizenship after orientalism.

In research on non‐Western populations there is a tendency to limit analysis to only gross demographic differences. This has resulted in the serious misconception of an ethnically homogenous population in countries such as Japan and thus masks a critical dimension of the diversity truly extant. This article examines Western research on Japanese views of people of African descent evident prior to 1945. The argument by Western researchers that Japanese are inherently ethnocentric/racist is examined through primary and secondary sources dealing with Japanese contact with Africans. The alternative explanation offered suggests that while the basic structure of ethnocentrism existed before Western contact, there are indications that this structure was given direction and focus (i.e. became racial) with and through that contact. It is suggested that the view acquired by the Japanese of Africans was based in large part on the collective representations presented to them by Euro‐Americans.

The traditional postcolonial focus on the modern and the European, and pre-modern and non-European empires has marginalized the study of empires like the Ottoman Empire whose temporal reign traversed the modern and pre-modern eras, and its geographical land mass covered parts of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa. Here, I first place the three postcolonial corollaries of the prioritization of contemporary inequality, the determination of its historical origins, and the target of its eventual elimination in conversation with the Ottoman Empire. I then discuss and articulate the two ensuing criticisms concerning the role of Islam and the fluidity of identities in states and societies. I argue that epistemologically, postcolonial studies criticize the European representations of Islam, but do not take the next step of generating alternate knowledge by engaging in empirical studies of Islamic empires like the Ottoman Empire. Ontologically, postcolonial studies draw strict official and unofficial lines between the European colonizer and the non-European colonized, yet such a clear-cut divide does not hold in the case of the Ottoman Empire where the lines were much more nuanced and identities much more fluid. Still, I argue that contemporary studies on the Ottoman Empire productively intersect with the postcolonial approach in three research areas: the exploration of the agency of imperial subjects; the deconstruction of the imperial center; and the articulation of bases of imperial domination other than the conventional European “rule of colonial difference” strictly predicated on race. I conclude with a call for an analysis of Ottoman postcoloniality in comparison to others such as the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Persian, Chinese, Mughal, and Japanese that negotiated modernity in a similar manner with the explicit intent to generate knowledge not influenced by the Western European historical experience.