Curriculum and Social Inquiry Research Papers

Recent decades have witnessed what could be called a 'religious turn'-a renewed focus on religion across all areas of life, including politics, academia, and education (Bachmann-Medick, 2016). Akin to what is called the 'linguistic turn' in philosophy-which brought attention to the constitutive and mediating role of language in the social construction of reality-the concept of 'religious turn' reflects a recognition of the role of religion in shaping discourses, social change, and practices in a variety of cultural contexts. This term has become more closely associated with Islam than with any other religion, and can be traced back to the 1980s and certainly the 1990s, following events such as the Iranian Revolution and the Rushdie Affair, and, more recently, the attacks of 11 September 2001 (9/11) and the London bombings of July 2005. Although intellectual and cultural shifts regarding religion were taking place before this time, these events had widespread implications for education and research agendas. One such implication has been the increased interest in adolescent Muslims as research subjects, leading subsequently to numerous studies about Muslims, schools, and religious identity internationally (Moulin, 2012). Another implication, particularly following the London bombings of July 2005, was the development of educational programmes and policies aimed at Muslim youth and intended to combat extremism. The articles in this Special Issue identify the privileging of religious identity as one key assumption underpinning academic, media, legal, and popular discourse about Muslims in recent decades. The term 'identity' is used in several different scientific paradigms and invoking it risks obscurity of meaning, and even cliché, yet, broadly, it provides a way of understanding the impact of cultural and political change upon how young people think about themselves, and the processes by which schooling sustains such meanings. It has thus become a common framework for scholars working in the fields of religion and in education, and for studies of Muslim children and youth in particular. This in itself represents one facet of the religious turn, because previously, identity was used in the cultural studies tradition, most notably by Stuart Hall, as an explanatory concept for understanding issues of race (Hall, 1996). By using religious identity to interpret and classify the diverse group of people who are now increasingly called 'Muslims' , religion supplants the prior categorisations of ethnicity, race, or nationality. This trend, it has been argued, does not just concern how Muslims are classified, but is part of a process of 'religification' taking place in the self-understanding and self-definition of Muslims themselves related to the increased likelihood of others to confer that religious identity upon them

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