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The disparities of COVID-19 vaccination rates between the rural and urban areas have become apparent during this pandemic. There is a need to understand the root causes of vaccine hesitancy demonstrated by the rural population to increase coverage and to contain the disease spread throughout the United States. This study aimed to explore other factors influencing vaccine hesitancy among rural dwellers besides the geography-related barriers such as poor health care access and individuals having no or suboptimal insurance coverage.

By reviewing existing data and literature about vaccination, health literacy, and behaviors, and prevailing ideologies, we discuss the potential causes of vaccine hesitancy in rural areas that could create barriers for successful public health efforts related to vaccine coverage and provide suggestions to ameliorate the situation.

Geography-related barriers, health literacy, and preconceived notions are key determinants of adopting healthy behaviors and complying with public health authorities' recommendations among rural individuals during a public-health crisis. We argue that ideology, which is much deeper than preconception or misconception on vaccination, should be incorporated as a key factor to redefine the term “vulnerable populations” in public health research.

The limitation of our study is that we have not found an effective way to encourage the populations who hold conservative religious and political ideologies to join the efforts for public health. Even though geography-related barriers may strongly impact the rural dwellers in achieving optimal health, the various forms of ideologies they have toward certain health behaviors cannot be discounted to understand and address vaccine-related disparities in rural areas. There is a need to redefine the term “vulnerable population” particularly as it relates to rural areas in the United States. During large-scale public health disasters, scholars and public health authorities should consider the ideologies of individuals, in addition to other factors such as race/ethnicity, area of residence (rural vs. urban), and socioeconomic factors influencing the existing vulnerabilities and health disparities.

After the electoral victory in 2018, the newly formed Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government presented its National Education Policy Framework, chalking out its priorities of bringing more than 22 million out-of-school children to schools, improving educational quality, and introducing a uniform education system in the country. However, the government’s grand ambitions, transpired quickly, only to produce a draft of a new unified curriculum in 2020. This chapter investigates the newly formulated Single National Curriculum (SNC) in Pakistan by using the lens of Critical Cultural Political Economy of Education (CCPEE). To understand the endogenous and exogenous factors shaping the SNC, the chapter argues that securitization and neoliberalization are the significant factors informing the development and the production of the new curriculum.

This chapter offers information about the formation of the peer personality of generations, with a specific focus on the global peer personality of Generation Z as found in the Global Gen Z Study. An explanation of the study's data collection procedures, including existing validated scales used within the survey, and data analysis methods, including the use of regionally disaggregated groups from the World Values Survey (World Values Survey Association, 2022), is discussed.

Research indicates a long historical connection between racism and nationalist ideologies. This connection has been highlighted in the resurgence of exclusionary nationalism in recent years, across many multicultural societies. This chapter discusses the notions of race, ethnicity and nation, and critically examines how racism shapes contemporary manifestations of nationalist discourse across the world. It explores the historical role of settler-colonialism, imperial expansions and the capitalist development in shaping the racial/ethnic aspect of nationalist development. Moreover, it provides an analysis of the interconnections between the racialisation of minorities, exclusionary ideologies and the consolidation of ethno-nationalist tropes. This chapter further considers the impact of demographic changes in reinforcing anti-migrant exclusionary sentiments. This is examined in connection with emerging nativist discourse, exploring how xenophobic racism has shaped and is shaped by nostalgic nationalism based on the sanitisation of the legacies of Empire and colonialism.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

While most West European nations were formed around pre-existing entities that could be called “countries” before the modern age, this was not the case in the Middle East. Some entities, like Egypt, did have a clear political and cultural identity before colonialism, others, like Algeria, did not. This chapter discusses the four states of the Maghreb: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, through the perspective of “country creation” going into and coming out of colonial rule. We can see here two “models” of fairly similar types of historical development, one showing a gradual process through a protectorate period to relatively stable modern nations, another through violent conquest and direct colonization ending in violent liberation and military and wealthy but fragile states. The article asks whether these models for the history of country creation and the presence or absence of pre-colonial identities can help explain the modern history and nature of these states in the Arab Spring and the years thereafter. Then, a more tentative attempt is made to apply these models to two countries of the Arab east, Syria and Iraq. While local variations ensure that no model can be transferred directly, it can show the importance of studying the historical factors that go into the transition from geographical region to a country with people that can form the basis of a nation.

Pakistan had never been a place of serious and nuanced debate and contestation of politics of postcolonial critique, that is, the continuity of economic, political, and cultural dependency of newly independent countries (NICs) on ex-colonizers as pointed out by neocolonialism, dependency theory, and postcolonial theory, respectively. Instead, Pakistan is presented by extant liberal academic literature as a “failed nation” and a state dominated by the military and plagued by religious extremism. As opposed to this, through the literary and activists writings of Aziz-ul-Haq, this chapter will try to illustrate how cultural contestation of the nation-building project postindependence from British rule was a lot more complex and interesting in Pakistan. This was so because the nation-building project of Pakistan was, on the one hand, an amalgamation of Indo-Persian, Arab, Indian, and Western colonial and civilizational influences and, on the other hand, entailed suppression of resilient local and national cultures of its constituent nationalities developed over centuries. This was later expressed in ethno-nationalist politics. However, when it came to the politics of the marginalized in the late 1960s, there were important political, theoretical, and literary insights which caused a change in the direction of political practice in Pakistan, which paralleled the politics expressed by writers like Fanon and early Subaltern Studies influenced by the Naxal Movement in India. The contestation and confusion arising from this dialectic also entered Pakistan's literary and cultural sphere. This chapter not only tries to give a different postcolonial critique of the failure of nation-building project in Pakistan but, though at a preliminary level, is an attempt to separate the original postcolonial theory in its radical tradition from contemporary postmodern/poststructuralist postcolonial theory marked with pessimism and resignation.

Mohammad Azharuddin's arrival in professional cricket served, to quote Karl Marx, as a reform of consciousness that awakened the sport ‘from its dream about itself’. His expertise with the bat invoked the wide expanse of human sensorium, provoking reactions of shock and admiration among observers. In this chapter, I examine Azharuddin's life in cricket and public through a dialectical probing of the relationship between shock and aesthetics. Azhar and cricket appear as a productive terrain to carry out the analysis, as it pushes the possibility of what or who can be considered as a valid subject for theoretical scrutiny. Taking cues from Walter Benjamin and CLR James, I theorise the shock effects created by a cricketer most unusual. From his wristy wizardry with the bat to his appointment as captain of the Indian men's cricket team during the rise of Hindu nationalism in the country, Azharuddin's presence and popularity extended beyond the boundaries that are often imposed on a sportsperson. Through his involvement in the match-fixing scandal that was exposed at the turn of the 21st century, Azhar (the name by which he was popularly known) challenged the mores of a game that had emphasised Victorian notions of purity on and off the field. For the purposes of this chapter, I discuss how Azhar constructed a bodily discourse that pushes us to reassess our very notions of art and aesthetics.