Author: idareteam

In 1978, Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said changed the discourse around the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region forever when he published his book ‘Orientalism’. In the book, Said assesses that ‘the West’ – in particular France, the UK and the US – view and discuss the WANA region in stigmatized, racist and supremacist terms, reflecting various forms of power ‘the West’ holds over ‘the East’. He describes Orientalism as a “style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’” (p.2). This distinction between East and West is a

“Arabs, for example, are thought of as camel-riding, terroristic, hook-nosed, venal lechers whose undeserved wealth is an affront to real civilization.” – Edward Said Orientalism is a built-in system or a method by which the West, not only socially constructed and actually produced the Orient, but controlled and managed it through a hegemony of power relations, working through the tropes, images and representation of literature, art, visual media, films and travel writing among other aspects of cultural and political appropriation. This extract is from the ground-breaking book of the Palestinian author Edward Said, entitled Orientalism. Said shows how Orientalism legitimized Western

In 1978, the Palestinian-American professor and writer Edward Said published his work Orientalism, that sparked an everlasting debate on the topic. In his book, he analysed the English, French and American literary production about the so called “Oriental” cultures, defining Orientalism as the way West portrays especially the Middle East and North Africa region. Through the centuries, these areas have seen through a western perspective, creating and reinforcing stereotypes that saw those regions as something different, ‘other’. As Said states in his critic to the pome White Man’s Burden by Rudyard Kipling: Only an Occidental could speak of Orientals, for

“What we see depends mainly on what we look for” – John Lubbock  The confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias. It is the tendency to listen mostly to information that confirm our existing beliefs and reinforces the things we already think. For example, this happens when we prefer a TV news broadcaster to another just because we know it will not contradict our existing view, or on social media, when we only share articles that reinforce our existing beliefs. Confirmation biases influence the way we gather information, and how we interpret and recall them. For example, people who support

“One way or another we are all biased, but still we have the modern cortical capacity to choose whether or not to let the harmful biases dictate our behaviour.” – Abhijit Naskar  A cognitive bias is a subconscious error in thinking that leads you to misinterpret information from the world around you, and affects the rationality and accuracy of decisions and judgments. In the early 1970s, the scholars Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the term ‘cognitive bias’ to describe people’s systematic but apparently wrong patterns of responses to judgment and decision problems. In the past 35-year the term “cognitive bias”

As humans, sometimes we think irrationally. The ways we act, we treat other people, we make decisions may be influenced by some peculiar processes that happen in our brains, known as Cognitive Biases. “Cognitive biases are systematic cognitive dispositions or inclinations in human thinking and reasoning that often do not comply with the tenets of logic, probability reasoning, and plausibility. These intuitive and subconscious tendencies are at the basis of human judgment, decision making, and the resulting behavior” (Korteling; Toet, 2022: 610). In simple words, a bias is an involuntary error that makes us process information incorrectly, affecting the way we

What causes injustice and stereotypes? They can happen for countless factors, but what no one knows is that cognitive bias can be one of the causes and that our own brain can trick us into having stereotypes and misjudging people. Cognitive biases affect not only our decision-making processes but also our judgement about other people, therefore influencing the way we treat them. One bias that affects our judgement is the Fundamental attribution error (FAE), also known as correspondence bias or over attribution bias. By definition, FAE is the tendency to overestimate the degree to which an individual’s behavior is determined by his or

“All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished” Marshall B. Rosenberg  Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is a process of communication created by psychologist Marshall Rosenberg. It is sometimes referred to as “compassionate communication.” Nonviolent communication is communication that maximizes liberty, enhances understanding of the relationship between feelings and needs, promotes equality, and creates compassion. NVC is a compilation of ideas about compassionate human behaviour, presented in order to fit with modern times. NVC can be used in every environment, from school to interpersonal

Water Scarcity Around the Globe: Reasons, Issues and Consequences Today, water scarcity – the limited access to much needed water – affects four billion people globally at least one month per year. While this number is alarming, by 2025, half of the world’s population could be living in areas affected by water scarcity, and by 2030, some 700 million people made refugees due to the phenomenon. The reasons for water scarcity are as diverse as its consequences. Collapsed infrastructure and distribution systems, contamination, conflict, and poor management of water resources by governments tie into factors related to the climate crisis. Around

The Middle East, like much of the world, is getting hotter, the already hot and dry climate is changing rapidly and it’s raining less.  People can live without a lot of things, but no one can live without water. In terms of environmental issues, Jordan is one of the poorest in the world when it comes to water and climate change is making things worse. It’s a landlocked country with a small opening to the Red Sea, and a country that gets low rainfall. Other environmental challenges that the country is tracking includes the disappearing waters of the Dead Sea,