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10 November 2025
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- Articles10 November 2025
Pedagogical Escapism and Western Performativity: A Psycho-Aesthetic Critique of Belly-Dance Adaption Symbolics
This paper addresses positionality misreading in Western pedagogical adaptions of belly dancing. Raqs Sharqi, known in the West as belly dancing, is a predominantly West Asian and North African discipline and performance art with multimodal varieties, globally taught and practiced while crossing sport, narratology, and story-telling boundaries. As a unique performance activity, it portrays a dynamic entertainment space to connect one’s multiple identities. I argue that Raqs Sharqi, not only as an aesthetic-educational art form but also, perhaps unwittingly, reiterated as an Orientalist communication trope in belly dancing, has forged East-West performativity models. However, the historical education-literature for Western women and modern adaptions of Raqs Sharqi are socio-culturally disconnected. In want of aesthetic meaning-making for contemporary cultural identity elaborations, Western pedagogical and adaption processes overlook elemental aspects including cultural perspectives, the process of cognitive development, individual authenticity, and group politics of belonging and autonomy. Challenging Eurocentric and English-speaking narratives about Middle Eastern identities, Raqs Sharqi, in its intersectional positionality, is the loci of continued West Asian and North African identity heterogeneities. The narrative fluidity afforded to this historical and religious conceptualization, I contend, is somewhat lost in conceptions of Western dance homogeneity in entertainment. Reasons are multidimensional, illustrative of patriarchal histories of women’s education, Western literary and art erotic-exotic rhetoric traps, and the influence of contemporary media and digitalization. Drawing on philosophical foregrounding, Dialogical Self Theory (DST), and symbolic interactionism, this study elucidates the progress of escapism and performativity enforced by positionality misreadings in Raqs Sharqi. In so doing, I expand on the colonial continuity of dance pedagogy, delineating the socio-positionalities of pedagogic framing and empowerment double standards.
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- Articles10 November 2025
From Sensibility to Critical Engagement: Sympathy, Animality, and Subjecthood in Wollstonecraft’s Maria and Vindication
This paper examines Mary Wollstonecraft’s strategic use of sentimental animal tropes alongside rationalist critique in Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), arguing that she mobilizes sensibility not as an end in itself, but as a pedagogical instrument within a broader project of aesthetic education—one intended to move readers from affective sympathy toward political and philosophical judgment. Focusing in particular on animal metaphors—especially in the character of Jemima, who repeatedly figures herself as a domesticated and brutalized creature—I trace how Wollstonecraft employs tropes of animality to illuminate the processes by which women are rendered less than human. At the same time, she insists that the very faculty denied to women by patriarchal society—rational reflection—is what marks the boundary between the human and the nonhuman. In this light, animal metaphors function paradoxically: they expose women’s dehumanization while simultaneously staging the reassertion of their moral and intellectual agency. Wollstonecraft’s appeal to sympathy, therefore, is intentionally unstable. It elicits emotional identification with suffering women only to disrupt that identification, urging readers to critique the social and epistemological structures that produce such suffering in the first place. - Journal Article10 November 2025
- Articles10 November 2025
Pedagogical Escapism and Western Performativity: A Psycho-Aesthetic Critique of Belly-Dance Adaption Symbolics
This paper addresses positionality misreading in Western pedagogical adaptions of belly dancing. Raqs Sharqi, known in the West as belly dancing, is a predominantly West Asian and North African discipline and performance art with multimodal varieties, globally taught and practiced while crossing sport, narratology, and story-telling boundaries. As a unique performance activity, it portrays a dynamic entertainment space to connect one’s multiple identities. I argue that Raqs Sharqi, not only as an aesthetic-educational art form but also, perhaps unwittingly, reiterated as an Orientalist communication trope in belly dancing, has forged East-West performativity models. However, the historical education-literature for Western women and modern adaptions of Raqs Sharqi are socio-culturally disconnected. In want of aesthetic meaning-making for contemporary cultural identity elaborations, Western pedagogical and adaption processes overlook elemental aspects including cultural perspectives, the process of cognitive development, individual authenticity, and group politics of belonging and autonomy. Challenging Eurocentric and English-speaking narratives about Middle Eastern identities, Raqs Sharqi, in its intersectional positionality, is the loci of continued West Asian and North African identity heterogeneities. The narrative fluidity afforded to this historical and religious conceptualization, I contend, is somewhat lost in conceptions of Western dance homogeneity in entertainment. Reasons are multidimensional, illustrative of patriarchal histories of women’s education, Western literary and art erotic-exotic rhetoric traps, and the influence of contemporary media and digitalization. Drawing on philosophical foregrounding, Dialogical Self Theory (DST), and symbolic interactionism, this study elucidates the progress of escapism and performativity enforced by positionality misreadings in Raqs Sharqi. In so doing, I expand on the colonial continuity of dance pedagogy, delineating the socio-positionalities of pedagogic framing and empowerment double standards. - Journal Article10 November 2025
The Art Critic as Learner: A Review of Erica Cardwell’s Wrong is Not My Name
Erica Cardwell’s debut book Wrong is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art is about art, race, family and perhaps most prominently, about grief. Through her personal experiences with these themes, Cardwell’s voice as art critic is still undeniably present throughout the entirety of the text. Wrong is Not My Name reminds readers of the power of art to push us towards growth, but in the context of this issue on Aesthetic Education, I focus on Cardwell’s approach to art as critic, which she continually grounds in her approach to art as learner. It is this orientation in particular that I think offers those of us who aspire to, or perhaps already practice, art criticism a reflection on the impact of our work and the attitudes we bring to it. - Articles10 November 2025
Beyond the Madrasah: Digital Pedagogies and Nigerian Yoruba Muslim Women's Engagement with Islamic Knowledge
This paper explores how digital pedagogies are reshaping the landscape of Islamic education among Nigerian Muslim women, with a primary focus on Yoruba communities in Southern Nigeria. Historically, Islamic learning in Nigeria has been rooted in traditional institutions, notably the madrasa, characterized by face-to-face instruction and rigid gender norms. However, the proliferation of digital technologies - particularly online madrasas, WhatsApp study groups, Zoom-based Qur’anic classes, and Islamic mobile applications - has significantly altered women’s access to religious knowledge. Utilizing ethnographic evidence and qualitative interviews, this interdisciplinary study examines how digital platforms enhance accessibility, overcome sociocultural barriers, and enable Nigerian Yoruba Muslim women to engage with a global Islamic discourse. The analysis underscores the benefits of digital transformation, including increased autonomy in learning, flexibility, and expanded religious authority, while critically addressing challenges such as digital literacy gaps, infrastructural disparities, and concerns about content authenticity. By applying perspectives from digital pedagogy, Islamic educational traditions, and gender studies, this research highlights how technological innovations facilitate a dynamic, responsive form of Islamic scholarship that meets contemporary educational needs. Finally, the study outlines avenues for future research, emphasizing the need for deeper investigations into equitable access and sustained integration of digital and traditional Islamic learning frameworks.