Blog post by Jihane Sliti and Iman Lechkar, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

With the rapidly deteriorating security situation in North East Syria, media discourse once again presents the issue of Kurdish-led camps and its prisoners as a security threat. As the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) lose control over detention camps, such as Al Hol, reports of mass escapes of Islamic State members dominate the news. In Belgium, this renewed sense of urgency was reinforced when Minister of Foreign Affairs Michel Prevot stated on 22 January 2026 that ‘terrorist fighters will not be able to return to Belgium’.

Fear-driven discourses are not new. For more than a decade, public and political debates on Belgian men who travelled to Syria have largely been shaped by punitive logics and vindictiveness. Yet our research shows that ‘foreign fighters’ have not always been framed as irredeemable threats. Media discourse has, at times, allowed for complexity and empathy, though not for everyone.

Based on a critical media discourse analysis, our research published in our Identities article, ‘On altar boys and good-hearted guys: de-Othering and the whitening of male convert “foreign fighters” in Belgian newspapers’, shows that the category of ‘foreign fighters’ was not always associated with danger. While born Muslim Belgian men who left for Syria were frequently depicted as barbaric and irredeemable, converts were mostly presented as naïve and disillusioned individuals who had made poor choices. Indeed, scholarly literature discerns two main depictions of convert men as naïve, disillusioned and redeemable, or as traitors, radical and in high-ranking positions. 

Blog post by Heisnam Olivia Devi and Hashik Nadukkandiyil, Tezpur University, India
 
When cultural tradition is invoked, who gets to belong? This question is central to our research on trans women in Manipur, India, known locally as nupi maanbi. Their presence in festivals and rituals is both visible and contested, showing how tradition can act as a tool of inclusion or exclusion.
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One of the most important sites where this tension unfolds is the Lai Haraoba festival, a pivotal event in Meitei society. Lai Haraoba celebrates creation, deities and community life through ritual dance and music. The performances are led by maibis (Meitei shamans, including nupi amaibis and nupa amaibis) accompanied by maibas (male shamans) playing the pena, a traditional musical instrument. Within this linguistic and cultural framework, amaibi refers to a priestess figure in the Meitei tradition, encompassing both nupi amaibis (female priestesses) and nupa amaibis (individuals assigned male at birth who represent femininity in their priestly functions, including nupi maanbis). In recent years, cultural organizations in Manipur have restricted the participation of nupi maanbi, arguing that the celebration must adhere to a rigid male-female binary, and justifying this exclusion in the name of preserving tradition. In practice, however, this exclusion narrows who counts as culturally legitimate.

Blog post by Çağlar Çetin-Ayşe, Augustana College, USA
 
When discussions of gender equality surface in Turkey, attention often centers on women’s struggles and resistance. My research, published in Identities as ‘Unpacking the nexus of ethnoreligious identity, minority status, and young men’s feminist self-identification in Turkey’, shifts that focus to diverse young men who support gender equality. Based on face-to-face interviews I conducted with Sunni Turkish, Kurdish, Alevi and Arab Alawite men, the study examines how their ethnoreligious identities shape their paths toward (or away from) feminist allyship. The findings complicate the widespread assumption that marginalization fosters empathy for other oppressed groups.

Across Europe and beyond, public debates may frame minority men (such as Muslim men in Scandinavian countries or Kurdish men in Turkey) as either threats to gender equality or as potential allies due to their experiences of exclusion. But the picture is far more complex. In Turkey, a country deeply polarized along ethnic, religious and political lines, these dynamics play out in unexpected ways.

Blog post by Heather Poke, Michigan State University, USA
 
In this blog, Heather Poke, a second-year master’s student in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University, reflects on what it means to navigate higher education as a first-generation Black woman from a low-income, rural community in Alabama.
 
I remember watching the different road signs pass by through the window in my U-Haul, and reality kicked in: I’m really moving 12 hours away from home. My first day of class at the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University was terrifying, yet a proud moment. I was the first of my family to move hours away from home ‘just for school’, as my parents stated. And the only thing I kept repeating to myself was: ‘You’re too country for the north’.
 
Despite moving to a slightly better environment, I had to leave behind things that shaped me, like my hometown. I grew up in a rural town in Alabama, called York, a predominantly Black community with limited resources. Not only were the resources limited for my community (health), but also academically.
My community placed my high school basketball team on a pedestal, and the idea of relying on higher education was considered a shadow or often viewed as a dream rather than a reality. Observing my loved ones struggle to make ends meet while still being classified as ‘lower class’ inspired me to seek education as a means of achieving stability and opportunity. This is what motivated me to further my education. 

Blog post by Muhammad Habib Qazi, University of Central Punjab, Pakistan

Punjabi, the language of Pakistan’s largest ethnic community, continues to face marginalization despite its deep-rooted cultural and historical significance. This linguistic relegation is not merely the result of state policies but is also reinforced at the societal level, particularly by Punjabi women. Their role in fostering linguistic cringe has been a crucial yet underexplored phenomenon. The term linguistic cringe refers to one’s feeling of embarrassment about their linguistic and cultural products vis-à-vis those of dominant languages and cultures (Phillips 2006). My Identities article, ‘Ethnic languages conundrum in postcolonial Pakistan and the role of women in fostering Punjabi linguistic cringe’, investigates the ways in which postcolonial socio-political structures and internalized stigmas have led Punjabi women to distance themselves from their mother tongue.
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Based on a mixed-method approach, the study draws on data from 312 randomly sampled Punjabi women through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. The findings reveal that colonial legacies and postcolonial nation-building efforts have led to the assertion and imposition of Urdu and English as superior languages, pushing Punjabi to the periphery. This imposed linguistic hierarchy has contributed to Punjabi women’s reluctance to pass the language on to their children, reinforcing its decline and strengthening the perception of Punjabi as a ‘backward’ or ‘rural’ language (John 2015; Asif 2005).

Blog post by Rosa Martinez-Cuadros, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain and Alberta Giorgi, University of Bergamo, Italy
 
When considering ‘Islam’ and ‘feminism’ in Europe, people often think to the topics of migration, terrorism, and related narratives of women’s oppression within ‘Islam’ and opposition between ‘Islam’ and ‘Europe’. These narratives have been fuelled by the rise of far-right movements and Islamophobic discourses that associate ‘Islam’ with chauvinism, or male dominance. Additionally, European feminist movements are traditionally secular, with a long story of opposition to, and emancipation from, religion (Christian religion, more specifically): hence, religion, including Islam, is often primarily framed as a context of oppression for women.
 
This creates a complex environment for activist Muslim women living in Europe, especially those who aim to be engaged in civil society organizations and local politics. In this context, how do activist Muslim women respond to these challenges? Do they identify as feminists?

Blog post by Debra L. DeLaet, Drake University, USA

On February 6 each year, the United Nations observes the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). This observance aligns with anti-FGM initiatives within numerous UN agencies. Eradicating FGM by 2030 is a critical target of Sustainable Development Goal 5 focused on promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. In 2024, the theme of the International Day of Zero Tolerance for FGM was #HerVoiceMatters, described as an effort to elevate the voices of survivors in mobilizing support for global efforts to eliminate FGM.

Despite the implied universality in campaigns such as #HerVoiceMatters, legal inconsistencies and cultural biases in global anti-FGM initiatives beg questions about whose voices – and whose bodies – matter in practice. According to the official website for the International Day of Zero Tolerance for FGM, FGM ‘comprises all procedures that involve altering or injuring the female genitalia for non-medical reasons…’ The simplicity of this definition, alongside the stated goal of zero tolerance, asserts a universal standard that seemingly should apply to women and girls across cultures. 

Blog post by Anne-Iris Romens, University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy, and Francesca Vianello, University of Padua, Italy

In the context of the hardening of the political discourse, skilled migrations are presented as one of the few remaining acceptable ways of entering European countries. A recent example is the parliamentary debate in France regarding the adoption of the increasingly restrictive law on immigration, which further limits access to residence permits and social rights.
 
Despite this rhetoric, the knowledge and skills of migrants are rarely valued in the job market. Migrants are mainly forced to accept jobs which enjoy little social recognition. Migrant women, in particular, tend to be confined to low-pay jobs in the care sector, including when they hold university degrees.
 
These examples illustrate the ambiguity of the concept of ‘skills’. The notion works as a social marker according to which some bodies are marked as skilled, and others as unskilled, with class, racialization and gender having a significant impact. In this field, recruiters have a key role in defining whose abilities are to be compensated and whose are to be hidden.

Blog post by Ece Yoltay, Ahi Evran University, Turkey

My Identities article, ‘Queering trialectics among space, power, and the subject: spatial representations and practices of othered identities in Turkey’, is grounded in a critical analysis of the Foucaldian conceptualization of the relation between power and the subject. It does so by examining the construction of the concept of ‘supra-identity’ with the Repressive and Ideological State Apparatus in Turkey. Since the Republic of Turkey was established as a nation-state in a predominantly Muslim society, various legal and social regulations determining state-citizen relationships have been shaped in its political history (single-party period 1923-1946, multi-party period 1946-2018, Presidential system 2018-present). While each government in this history produces its own political interpretation of the 'ideal' citizen, the emphasis on Turkish and Muslim identities, particularly within the heteronormative social structure associated with Islam, has been common value for defining ‘supra-identity’. In Turkey's multicultural society, homogenizing differences over these identity values of the 'majority' has been deemed necessary for the 'unity of the state'.

Blog post by Nickesia Gordon, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
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The thematic focus of the July 2023 Commonwealth Parliamentary Association’s (CPA), Regional Conference on Women’s Political and Parliamentary Leadership once again underscores the need for greater equity as it pertains to women’s engagement in political leadership across the Caribbean. This event was hosted by the group, Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians from the CPA Jamaica Branch, under the theme, ‘Empowering Women in Politics and Parliament: Inspiring Leadership, Driving Change.’ As much as the title theme of the conference is telling, so too is the location in which it took place; namely, New Kingston, Jamaica, an upper middle class mixed residential and business neighbourhood populated by Jamaica’s elite. 

Blog post by Fatima Rajina, De Montfort University, UK

When we think about Muslim clothing, often our immediate thoughts turn to Muslim women and their sartorial choices. Much of this has been framed via the media because of its incessant coverage, focusing on many European countries and their legislation monitoring Muslim women's clothing choices. This very discussion is in the press currently, as France has banned wearing the abaya in schools for young Muslim girls. It is precisely this framing that made me think about where Muslim men fit into this equation. How do Muslim men choose what they wear in public? What informs their decisions?
 
As a result, in my Identities article, 'British Muslim men and clothes: the role of stigma and the political (re)configurations around sartorial choices', I diverted from the fixation on Muslim women and interrogated the political imagination and (re)configuration of dress practices among British Bangladeshi Muslim men. I selected three attires, the lungi, the funjabi and the thobe, because of what they represent for Bangladeshis. The lungi and funjabi, although associated with Bangladeshis, carry different meanings in the diaspora than in Bangladesh. I explore how these two garments are worn in the UK and how they (re)appear in public. In contrast, the thobe projects an Islamic universalism not afforded to the first two garbs and carries a different form of visibility. I focus on how British Bangladeshis of varying age groups interact with different forms of attire and what it means for their identity negotiation in the public sphere.

Blog post by Emiliana De Blasio, LUISS University, Italy, Marco Palillo, University of  Bradford, UK and Donatella Selva, University of Florence, Italy

Over the last decade, the Mediterranean Sea has become one of the deadliest migration routes for asylum seekers and migrants wanting to reach Europe from Libya. In response to the high numbers of deaths associated with perilous journeys and dangerous smuggling strategies, numerous non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have been operating in the Mediterranean Sea to provide search and rescue (SAR) operations to migrant vessels in distress at sea.

Over the years, the new centrality of NGOs’ humanitarian efforts in the Mediterranean Sea in the Italian public and media discourse has led to significant tensions with right-wing parties. Most notably, Matteo Salvini’s League and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy have repeatedly criticised NGOs involved in SAR operations for facilitating irregular migration flows and defying Italian border control policies. Since its inauguration in October 2022, the newly installed government led by Giorgia Meloni has engaged in a series of clashes with NGOs running SAR operations in the Mediterranean Sea as part of the government’s hard-line stance on ‘illegal’ migration. In particular, Meloni’s government has promoted a new migration policy that introduces further restrictions on the capacity for NGO vessels to conduct multiple rescues in the same mission. 

Blog post by William Shankley, University of Nottingham, UK

​Nearly twenty years have passed since the expansion of the European Union (EU) led to the significant movement of Polish citizens to the UK. Despite the UK's subsequent departure from the EU, Polish migration assumes a prominent place in the country's migrant diversity.
 
Belonging is a crucial aspect of migrants' lived experience in another country, and previous studies on Polish migrant belonging in the UK have primarily focused on the neighbourhood context as this is contested, resisted and reshaped. Additionally, the majority of existing research has predominantly concentrated on Polish migrants' belonging among those working in low-skilled industries, which was the dominant occupational position most Polish migrants entered into. Nonetheless, Polish migrants' entry into a range of workplaces after their migration offers an equally important site in which to examine their belonging. Furthermore, there has also been a lack of research into Polish migrants working in professional occupations and their belonging at work.

Earlier this year, Home Secretary Suella Braverman announced she was not proceeding with multiple recommendations made by Wendy Williams’ public inquiry into the Windrush Scandal. The inquiry examined the Home Office’s adverse actions against people from the Windrush generation who predominantly migrated to Britain from the Caribbean between 1948 and 1973 (Gentleman 2019; Slaven 2022). Reports have detailed the profound effects on those directly impacted, revealing stories of individuals who were denied healthcare and welfare services, and in some cases were ripped away from their families; detained and even deported (Gentleman 2019; Williams 2020; Slaven 2022). The ensuing scandal thrust their treatment into the public consciousness and ignited a public uproar. Yet, as the scandal faded from media attention, we still have a limited understanding of the scandal’s broader impact on Britain's racialised communities, beyond those directly affected by the Home Office’s actions. ​

‘Identity’ is probably amongst the most circulated terms in the academy and beyond. However, a critical reflection on the use of this term in the context of cross-cultural fictional narratives could reveal a major issue. Rather than representing a genuine state of human condition, the term has become a strategic means used by some minority writers to boost readership for their writings.

Given the hierarchies of the world literary system consisting of influential agents such as critics, publishers and marketing expectations, certain languages, regions, styles and poetics are privileged over others. The world literary system thus mirrors the ‘neo-imperial contours of global capitalism’, dominated by multinational publishing conglomerates with powerhouses in London and New York.
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My Identities article, ‘We have much identity’: contesting the claimed hybrid identity in Faqir’s My Name is Salma and Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun’, examines how some Arab Anglophone women writers manipulate identity constructions and essentialise their hybrid identities as a strategy to boost readership and market values for their works. Through a close reading of Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma and Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun, the article reverses the gaze on the societies that these texts claim to reveal.  

Gender, as expressed on namely the bodies of Muslim women, is positioned at the centre of the radical right’s linkage between migration and religion. This link is visible in the persistent debates on the ban of Muslim body-covering, which in Austria has been promoted by the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) since the turn of the century.
 
FPÖ’s debates on the ban of Muslim body-covering – of the headscarf in kindergartens and schools or of full body-covering in public spaces – which re-emerged since 2015, illustrate that the radical right instrumentalizes the intersection of gender, body and religion in its search for new forms of governing.
 
As I explore in my recently published Identities article, ‘Radical right populist debates on female Muslim body-coverings in Austria. Between biopolitics and necropolitics’, the radical right’s debates over female Muslim body-covering are embedded in the neoliberal reorganisation of societies and a crisis of governability, which radical right-wing actors use to implement their own biopolitical and necropolitical projects. 

Blog post by Ov Cristian Norocel Lund University, Sweden and Alberta Giorgi University of Bergamo, Italy

Blog post based on Identities' Special Issue, Disentangling Radical Right Populism, Gender, and Religion, Volume 29, No 4, August 2022.

​A broad and perhaps underappreciated feature of radical right populism is its simultaneous mobilization of cultural Christianity, on occasion combined with secularism, and women’s (and sometimes LGBT+) rights in a racializing, anti-immigration, and anti-Islamic discourse. Take for example the recent reaction in the USA of Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who proclaimed on Twitter that ‘I am being attacked by the godless left because I said I’m a proud Christian Nationalist’ and added that she is even being called ‘a Nazi because I proudly love my country and my God’. By the same measure, in Italy, the League (La Lega) chairperson Matteo Salvini has previously maintained publicly his certainty that ‘Madonna will bring us the [political] victory’ and praised in religious conservative media the ‘traditional (heterosexual) family’. 

Coloniality deserves special attention to contextualise Professor Hempton’s lecture on “Women’s Networks: Opportunities and Limitations”. First, the context that overlaps historical and political elements: the year 1888. The poster at the back of Professor Hempton as he delivered the talk informed that the Gifford Lecture series dates from 1888. In the same year, Brazil declared the Abolition of Slavery – the last country in the Americas to officialise such law that is not fully put into practice as many cases of forced labour and slavery remain current.
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That reminded me of so many unofficial Black women’s collectives who organised as a quilombo, favelas communities, marginalised neighbourhoods (periferias) as they created ways to resist and refuse the places that the colonial-hegemonic society imposed on them. For example, the Herstories of Dandara and Luiza Mahin. Dandara refused to be enslaved and became a quilombo leader, a warrior, agriculture worker in the initial land rights, abolitionists, antiracist and feminist movements in Brazil during the late 1600s. Luiza Mahin was a Muslim, enslaved domestic worker, strategist of one of the most remarkable pro-abolitionist revolutions in Brasil – the Malês Revolt – organised by enslaved peoples. Her Islamic, Jêje-Nago and Yoruba backgrounds are the marks of intersecting systems of beliefs that to this day are erased in the narrative about Brazil’s national identity.

Concocted by the conservative quarters of the Vatican, the disparaging term 'gender ideology' has been taken up not only by the radical right, but also by some centre-left, liberal commentators, seemingly unconcerned with the concept's troublesome history. One notable example is the Economist's last year article denouncing the so-called 'trans ideology', titled A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities. In my Identities article, 'Framing ‘gender ideology’: religious populism in the Croatian Catholic Church', I consider the provenance of how the 'gender ideology' frame was utilized by the Catholic church in Croatia – one of the earliest cases of widespread anti-gender mobilization in Europe.
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Having gone through a double transition to a capitalist liberal democracy, the revived religious nationalism in Croatia competed with liberal values from the 'free Western world'. The generous Vatican agreements signed in the late '90s by the authoritarian, right-wing government provided fertile ground for a blossoming of Catholic evangelization and proliferation of lay activism. In contrast to current research on the populist radical right which demonstrates the manipulation of religion committed by political actors, I identify factions of the Church itself as populist entrepreneurs. Polarizing populist discourse is traced back to Pope John Paul II's warnings against 'the war of the powerful against the weak', and connected to newer doctrinal, papal writings on issues of gender, ecology and politics.

Populist parties and leaders have become important actors across the globe. The 2022 presidential elections in France, and parliamentary elections in Sweden, as well as Turkey’s 2023 presidential elections not only revived academic research on populism and stirred scholarly debate about how to conceptualize it, but also compelled electors and political actors to reflect on the political developments taking place on the populist right front.
 
In our Identities article, ‘The veil as an object of right-wing populist politics: A comparative perspective of Turkey, Sweden, and France’, we selected three countries which have extremely different religious, secular, and cultural contexts. We then analyzed the political statements by the radical right-wing parties in each of the chosen countries: the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) in Turkey, the National Rally (Rassamblement National, NR) in France and the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna, SDs) in Sweden. 

The adamant defense of Christianity by far-right populists, as well as their ostensible display of Christian symbols such as the rosary, have been interpreted as hijacking religion from the hands of religious leaders and institutions. In fact, religious leaders have often accused far-right politicians of instrumentalizing religion for political gain, while far-right politicians have accused religious leaders of not defending Christianity against Islam. In a sense, far-right populist actors present themselves as being better interpreters and defenders of Christianity than religious leaders.
 
As many scholars have pointed out, the Christianity that far-right populism defends is a matter of culture and tradition imbricated in the historical past and national identity rather than a matter of faith. Thus, populists have been accused of not being ‘true believers’ and twisting religion to better serve their aims, and self-identified religious people who support far-right populism have been framed as victims of the political instrumentalization of religion. In my Identities article, ‘Hijack or release? On the heuristic limits of the frame of instrumentalization of religion for discussing the entanglements of populism, religion, and gender’, I explore the relationships between populism and religion from another angle, taking the transformations undertaken by religion and religiosity in contemporary societies into account.

In 2018, Romania organised a national referendum with the goal of defining in the Constitution that a family is composed of a man and a woman. Most of the parliamentary political parties openly supported the issue. The turnout failed to pass the 30% threshold needed for the referendum to be validated, but 93% of those who voted were in favour of this restrictive definition of family. It should be noted that the Romanian referendum was not an isolated case. Similar mobilisations around family and marriage issues have taken place throughout Central and Eastern Europe since the beginning of the 2010s (Croatia 2013, Slovakia 2015, or Slovenia 2015, for instance).
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In our Identities article, ‘No populism’s land? Religion and gender in Romanian politics’, we analysed the way parliamentarians used religious symbols and contents within their speeches during the debates for the 2018 referendum. We focused our research on the parliamentary debates covering the adoption of the referendum in Parliament (2012–2018) and the follow-up period (2018–2020) to analyse the ways political actors conceive and represent religion and gender in contemporary politics. 

On April 11, 2015, Pia Kjaersgaard, former leader of radical right populist Danish People’s Party concluded in her opinion piece: ‘We must dare to say that Christianity is better than Islam’. One year later, during the so-called burkini debate in France, Marine Le Pen, leader of radical right populist National Rally (formerly National Front), wrote in her blog: ‘This is the soul of France that is in question (…) France does not lock away a woman’s body, France does not hide half of its population under the fallacious and hateful pretext that the other half fears it will be tempted.’
 
These examples illustrate phenomena that have interested both academics and the public following the rise of radical right populist parties in the last couple of decades. More clearly, how are religion and gender featured in the rhetoric of such parties? These debates reveal two paradoxes. 

You might reasonably wonder what Muay Thai or Kickboxing has got to do with race or division? Or what the niche sports of Muay Thai and Kickboxing are in the first place. Muay Thai is a combat sport originating from Thailand that evolved out of 17th-century warfare techniques and now incorporates punches, kicks, knees, elbows and clinching. Kickboxing has a similar ruleset, albeit elbows are illegal and clinching is limited. Training within both sports is an embodied practice that requires intimate bodily contact between training partners.
 
My Identities article, ‘Fighting with race: complex solidarities & constrained sameness’ (and the broader doctoral project it derives from), draws upon ethnographic field work and my experience training to compete in Muay Thai. Within the article, I explore how fighters seek to construct one another as the same, as fighters, as they disavow race and problematise prior notions of gender and masculinity (alongside other identity markers). In part, the disavow of gender and masculinity was enabled by the presence of female fighters, which contrasts with boxing gyms that are notable for the exclusion of women and/or for taking their fighting ambitions less seriously. Thus, whilst remaining a ‘hyper-masculine’ space, I foreground three factors that enable people to argue for contingent sameness.

​The latest evidence of Europe’s anxieties about immigrant (non-) integration comes in the form of a draft declaration released by Germany, France and Austria in November 2020. The declaration pushed for stricter EU integration rules, stating, ‘It needs to be possible to sanction sustained refusal to integrate more strongly than has been the case to date’.[1] Yet, each European country has always had a wide scope for determining how to admit and incorporate new members, and countries have not refrained from introducing strict measures. The latest trend is to start the integration process as early as possible – even before the migrant arrives, when traveling to Europe is just a dream. In recent years, France (2007), Denmark (2010), the UK (2011), the Netherlands (2006) and Germany (2009) have all introduced pre-integration measures for nationals of certain countries.
 
In my Identities article, ‘Cultivating membership abroad: Analyzing German pre-integration courses for Turkish marriage migrants’, I examine the aims and methods of German pre-integration courses offered to Turkish marriage migrants in Istanbul. Using participant observation and in-depth interviews, I also examine instructor perceptions and student reactions to the curriculum.