Common Ground Research Networks Publishers Prize
The Zionist pedagogical narrative reproduced in schoolbooks views the migration of Jews to Israel as the felicitous conclusion of the journey from the Holocaust to the Resurrection. It negates all forms of diasporic Jewish life and culture and ignores the history of Palestine during the 2000-year-long Jewish “exile.” This narrative otherizes three main groups vis-à-vis whom Israeliness is constituted: Holocaust victims, who are presented in a traumatizing manner as the stateless and therefore persecuted Jews “we” refuse but might become again if “we” lose control over Palestinian Arabs, who constitute the second group of “others.” Palestinians are racialized, demonized, and portrayed as “our” potential exterminators. The third group of “others” comprises non-European (Mizrahi and Ethiopian) Jews. They are described as backward people who lack history or culture and must undergo constant acculturation to fit into Israel’s “Western” society. Thus, a rhetoric of victimhood and power evolves, and a nationalistic interpretation of the “never again” imperative is inculcated, justifying the Occupation and oppression of Palestinians and the marginalization of non-European Jews. This rhetoric is conveyed multimodally through discourse, genres, and visual elements. The present study, which advocates a multidirectional memory, proposes an alternative Hebrew-Arabic, multi-voiced and poly-centered curriculum that would relate the accounts of the people whom the pedagogic narrative seeks to conceal and exclude. This joint curriculum will differ from the present one not only in content but also ideologically and semiotically. Instead of traumatizing and urging vengeance, it will encourage discussion and celebrate diversity and hybridity.
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Nurit Elhanan-Peled
The Zionist pedagogical narrative reproduced in schoolbooks views the migration of Jews to Israel as the felicitous conclusion of the journey from the Holocaust to the Resurrection. It negates all forms of diasporic Jewish life and culture and ignores the history of Palestine during the 2000-year-long Jewish “exile.” This narrative otherizes three main groups vis-à-vis whom Israeliness is constituted: Holocaust victims, who are presented in a traumatizing manner as the stateless and therefore persecuted Jews “we” refuse but might become again if “we” lose control over Palestinian Arabs, who constitute the second group of “others.” Palestinians are racialized, demonized, and portrayed as “our” potential exterminators. The third group of “others” comprises non-European (Mizrahi and Ethiopian) Jews. They are described as backward people who lack history or culture and must undergo constant acculturation to fit into Israel’s “Western” society. Thus, a rhetoric of victimhood and power evolves, and a nationalistic interpretation of the “never again” imperative is inculcated, justifying the Occupation and oppression of Palestinians and the marginalization of non-European Jews. This rhetoric is conveyed multimodally through discourse, genres, and visual elements. The present study, which advocates a multidirectional memory, proposes an alternative Hebrew-Arabic, multi-voiced and poly-centered curriculum that would relate the accounts of the people whom the pedagogic narrative seeks to conceal and exclude. This joint curriculum will differ from the present one not only in content but also ideologically and semiotically. Instead of traumatizing and urging vengeance, it will encourage discussion and celebrate diversity and hybridity.
2023 Finalists:
Conor Heffernan
Physical culture can be crudely defined as those exercise practices designed to physically change the body. In modern parlance we may associate physical culture with weightlifting, physical education, and/or calisthenics of various kinds. While the modern age has experienced an explosion of interest in gym-based activities, the practice of training one’s body has a much longer, and fascinating, history. This book provides an engaged and accessible historical overview from the Ancient World to the Modern Day. In it, readers are introduced to the training practices of Ancient Greece, India, and China among other areas. From there, the book explores the evolution of exercise systems and messages in the Western World with reference to three distinct epochs: the Middles Ages and Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and its aftermath and the nineteenth to the present day. Throughout the book, attention is drawn not only to how societies exercised, but why they did so. The purpose of this book is to provide those new to the field of physical culture an historical overview of some of the major trends and developments in exercise practices. More than that, the book challenges readers to reflect on the numerous meanings attached to the body and its training. As is discussed, physical culture was linked to military, religious, educational, aesthetic, and gendered messages. The training of the body, across millennia, was always about much more than muscularity or strength. Here both the exercise systems, and their meanings are studied.
2022 Finalists:
Jörg Krieger, April Henning, Lindsay Pieper, and Paul Dimeo
In the edited collection "Time Out: Global Perspectives on Sport and the Covid-19 Lockdown," practitioners and international scholars explore the impact of the global Covid-19 health pandemic on sport from a global perspective. It is part of a two-volume Covid-19 and Sport series that tackles the effects of the global lockdown on sport during March and April 2020, when restrictions were at their most severe and the human toll at its peak in many countries. The chapters provide a comprehensive overview of the immediate consequences of the Covid-19 lockdown on sport. This book presents a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives in a total of twenty individual chapters, organized around three main themes. The first section explores the reactions of international stakeholders within the global sport system to the pandemic. In section two, the authors focus on the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on sporting participants within an international context, including effects on both elite athletes and leisure sport participants. The final section includes the impacts on and reactions of individual sports.
2021 Finalists:
Patricia Reinheimer
Olly emerged in the artistic field in the 1950s. She amassed positive reviews about her production. However, in the artistic universe, claiming quality is not enough. It was necessary that her work dialogued with some of that universe’s significant proposals: they had to make sense. What was that sense? Recognized while producing, but forgotten after her death, it is to Olly’s trajectory the author seeks to assign meaning. "Olly: Race, Class, and Gender in the Invention of Rustic Modernity" is a tribute to the author’s grandparents and a critique of the attitude of much of the white Brazilian middle-class towards peripheric groups. Looking at the artist’s subjects, the author identifies in her web of relations the creation of the idea of a "sensibility" that was intended to be universal, but even though it was based on different peripheric groups, it was produced and consumed by a certain white middle-class audience..
2020 Finalists:
Richard A. Nissenbaum, Joseph E. B. Elliott
"In Exchange for Gold: The Legacy and Sustainability of Artisanal Gold Mining in Las Juntas de Abangares, Costa Rica" documents the linkage between human experience and ecology. Richard A. Nissenbaum and Joseph E. B. Elliott render a nuanced understanding of the complex issues involved in developing sustainable approaches to protecting the environment and how those approaches might also respect the communities and individuals inextricably tied to gold. Highlighting the personal, this case study honors a community, its rich culture, and history, while simultaneously examining the environmental and human cost of gold extraction.
2019 Finalists: