Fair Trade, Qur'anic Studies and Islamophobia Awareness
As the nights draw in and the spooky celebrations recede into the distance, we are delighted to share the highlights from the Journal of Fair Trade and ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. In recognition of Islamophobia Awareness Month, we also invite you to explore Islamophobia Studies Journal which focuses on the systematic study of Othering Islam and Muslims. It is produced in collaboration with the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project at the Center for Race and Gender at Berkeley.
All of our journals are Diamond Open Access and all articles are free to read. You can see our whole collection and the archive on ScienceOpen and JSTOR.
Journal of Fair Trade Volume 5, Issue 2 is the second special issue produced in association with the Fair Trade International Symposium. In the first article, “Faith communities and Fair Trade towns in the UK: Raising awareness of sustainable development”, Mark Dawson explores how the Luton Fair Trade Town (FTT) campaign raises awareness on the interconnected issues of sustainable communities, social justice, inequality and marginalisation, and also concerns for the environment. Allison Loconto explores how voluntary sustainability standards, including the Fairtrade standards, generate impact in “State of the Art: The impact of sustainability standards”…
In “The Sustainable Cocoa Debate: key controversies” Mantiaba Coulibaly-Ballet and Allison Locontoexplore ongoing tensions surrounding three key areas of sustainability practices: fair remuneration of producers, child labour and deforestation based on interviews in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and European countries. Zoia Pavlovskaia and Ali Kara’s paper on “Small business perceptions of barriers for adopting Fair Trade business model in the USA: Let’s give them the magic wand!” explores the motivations, characteristics, and perspectives of owners and managers of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Media, Pennsylvania, the first Fair Trade Town in the USA.
And finally Elisabeth Schneider from Fairtrade International explores “The Fairtrade Academic Collaboration Model: Putting in place the building blocks of collaboration between Fairtrade and academics”.
The latest issue of ReOrient Volume 9, Issue 1 is a special issue on The Qur’an and the Humanities. The issue intends to showcase the significance of a purposefully multidisciplinary examination of the Qur’an and its myriad dimensions as a way to firmly situate Qur’anic studies as an integral part of the Humanities, beyond specific silos of technical specialisations. Tehseen Thaver introduces the issue in “Toward a Post-Orientalist Conception of Qur’anic Studies”.
Walid Saleh connects questions of chronology in the Qur’an with larger problems to do with processes of identity formation in early Islam in “Early Medinan Suras: The Birth of Politics in the Qur’an”. Ash Geissinger seeks to reformulate our understanding of gender in the Qur’an in “Notes on the Siege’s Aftermath and Gendered Rhetoric in the Qur’an: Towards a Reconsideration of Q. 33:34”.
In “Finding the Qur’an in Imitation: Critical Mimesis from Musaylima to Finnegans Wake” William Sherman turns his attention to instances of attempts on the part of a range of actors, Muslim and non-Muslim, to produce Qur’anic imitations. Drawing on tools of literary theory Emmanuelle Stefanidis examines the stakes involved in offering competing chronologies of the Qur’an by Western scholars in ”In Search of Chronology: Narratives of Qur’anic Evolution in Western Academia”.
Tehseen Thaver asks, and addresses, the question of how we might theorise the relationship between Qur’an exegesis, ritual practice, and the formation of religious identities and communities in “Retrieving the Senses in Qur’anic Exegetical Texts: Shaykh Abu al-Futuh Razi’s Persian Qur’an Commentary”. In “Qur’anic Orality and Textual Epistemologies of the Humanities” Lauren Osborne makes a case for rethinking the exclusive privileging of textual interpretation as the touchstone of scholarship on the Qur’an.
And finally in “Ignoring the Bible in Qur’anic Studies Scholarship of the Late Twentieth Century” Devin J. Stewart uncovers the multiple political, institutional, and disciplinary factors that might explain this odd absence, through a focused intellectual history and analysis.
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