Challenging the legitimacy of exclusion: Muslim women and social boundaries in different headscarf policy contexts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Muslim women’s experience of social exclusion is pronounced across Western societies. This study assesses the expectation that legislated headscarf bans reinforce that experience, strengthening social boundaries. Our data source is interviews and focus groups with headscarf-wearing women in three distinct policy contexts: republican-secularist France, multicultural English-Canada, and intercultural Québec. We find that headscarf-based exclusion is pervasive across settings, with widespread reports of mistreatment. Yet, the degree of legitimacy or illegitimacy afforded to such exclusion by mainstream institutions and attitudes significantly affects women’s experience of and engagement in social boundary-drawing across cognitive, emotional, and behavioural levels. In France, the school headscarf ban has mainstream legitimacy and is rarely challenged behaviourally, though effects on cognitive and emotional boundaries are clear. Meanwhile, “spillover” exclusions in domains without formal bans prompt behavioural resistance. In Canada, headscarf restrictions lack legitimacy, especially in English-speaking regions, but exclusion nevertheless occurs, provoking rights-based resistance, including in Québec.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".