Contemporary<i>Laïcité</i>: Setting the Terms of a New Social Contract? The Slow Exclusion of Women Wearing Headscarves
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over recent decades, France has had to deal with the growing presence of immigrants from its ex‐colonies – a phenomenon that has been affecting many former colonial powers and accentuated by globalisation. Starting in the late 1980s, this presence translated itself, among other things, through an increased visibility of Islam. For instance, numbers of second‐ and third‐generation Muslim women, primarily of North African origin, have been expressing their religiosity by wearing a headscarf in the public sphere. Many members of the French state and society have perceived this as a threat to the secular settlement, as they understand the headscarf to be a sign indicating that the believer's first allegiance does not lie with the secular nation state, but with God and with a religious community (the ummah) that transcends national borders. This article argues that the headscarf controversy in France has been a way for the French secular state and elites to reinforce a certain exclusive understanding of laïcité (secularism), as being more than a legal principle, which symbolises an ethic of collective life. This ethic succeeds in becoming stronger and more tangible because it is able to convey a sense of who can be included, and who has to be excluded from collective life. In this case women wearing headscarves have been identified as incapable of protecting and fostering Republican values while, in addition, also representing an external threat. They have therefore been slowly excluded from partaking in the activities of the polis, and deprived from enjoying their full citizenship rights' and duties. To conduct this investigation, the article takes the March 2004 law banning visible religious symbols in public schools as a starting point, and analyses how from then onwards petitions, law proposals and governmental reports have recommended, in the name of laïcité, excluding headscarf wearers from a variety of public spaces.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".