Year: 2019

Australia (Conversation) – Around 80% of secondary school students who had classes about diverse religions claim to have positive views of Muslims. This compares to around 70% who had not attended such classes. Our national study of Australian Generation Z teens (those born around the mid-1990s to mid-2000s) showed teens who had been exposed to education about diverse religions and worldviews were more tolerant of religious minorities, including Muslims and Hindus, than those who hadn’t. General religious education is distinct from religious instruction, which is taught by teachers or volunteers…

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World Wide (Conversation) – Want to get into politics? It helps if you come from the right family. Our new study, published in the journal Historical Social Research in December 2018, shows that, on average, one in 10 world leaders comes from households with political ties. We examined the backgrounds of 1,029 political executives – that is, presidents and prime ministers – in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and Latin America from 2000 to 2017. We found that 119, or 12 percent, of all world leaders belonged to a…

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World WIde (Yes) – The first time I read the phrase “year of the woman” was in relation to the 1992 election. That year the most women ever—four—had been elected to serve in the U.S. Senate. Today, there are 25. And after millions of women across the world marched in protest of Donald Trump’s presidency, the explosion of the #MeToo movement, and last year’s record-breaking election of women to Congress—particularly women of color—the label endures. Truth is, every year is the “year of the woman.” Women have always been significant actors…

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Canada (Conversation) – With recent news of the college cheating scandal in which parents allegedly paid for their children to gain entrance to the most prestigious post-secondary institutions in the United States, increased attention has been placed on the extreme and even illegal measures parents will take to ensure their children are successful. Parenting trends that protect children from negative experiences and failure are far from new. The concept of “helicopter parenting” emerged in the 1980s to describe overly anxious parents who hover over their children to keep them safe. A…

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United States (Conversation) – One night, a woman I’ll call Tonya got a compliment from a guy when she was out with her boyfriend. Tonya’s boyfriend cursed her because another man had complimented her. He said: “You give it to everybody, I want it too.” In anticipation of his physical abuse, she reasoned, “I could go off to Wonder World.” She then injected heroin, to be “in her own world,” she later told me. Tonya is only one of the hundreds of women I’ve interviewed for my research with similar…

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United States (Conversation) – Sixty years ago, Dwight Eisenhower signed legislation making Hawaii America’s 50th state. The Hawaii admission act followed a centuries-old tradition in which American territories –acquired through war, conquest and purchase – became fully integrated states of the union. But Hawaii was not an ordinary United States territory and would be unlike any other American state. For one, Hawaii was not actually in America, at least not physically. Its islands lay in the Pacific, some 2,000 miles from the U.S. west coast. And Hawaii would become the…

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United States (Conversation) – The traditional homelands of 36 federally recognized tribes – including the Kumeyaay, Pai, Cocopah, O’odham, Yaqui, Apache and Kickapoo peoples – were split in two by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and 1853 Gadsden Purchase, which carved modern-day California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas out of northern Mexico. Today, tens of thousands of people belonging to U.S. Native tribes live in the Mexican states of Baja California, Sonora, Coahuila and Chihuahua, my research estimates. The Mexican government does not recognize indigenous peoples in Mexico as…

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Spain (Conversation) – It was a crime that shocked all of Spain: Five men raped an 18-year-old woman at Pamplona’s running of the bulls in July 2016, in a brutal assault captured on tape by the attackers. The case – known as La Manada, which means “mob” – led to national outrage in Spain, both online and in the streets, and a nine-year jail sentence for the perpetrators. Taken together with the #MeToo movement, which began in the United States in 2017 and quickly spread around the globe, sexual assault…

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