1,720,961 research outputs found
Silent adhan : exploring the muslim call to prayer in metro Vancouver
No full textThe adhan is the Muslim call to prayer which is recited five times a day to call the faithful to pray. In contrast to many Muslim majority countries in the world where the adhan is audible and a part of the public soundscape, the adhan is not publicly recited regularly in Canada. Due to Covid-19, limited public recitations of the adhan have been allowed since 2020, during the Ramadan period of fasting.
In this thesis I explore the absence of the public recitation of the adhan in Metro Vancouver. The adhan and its public recitation has not attracted specific scholarly attention in Canada. It is a lacuna in the scholarship surrounding Islam in Canada.
This thesis centers the adhan and its public recitation through an interdisciplinary methodology using research-creation (an original short film – Silent Azaan which forms a part of this thesis) and an analysis of an online archive of documented public adhan recitations in Canada in 2020 hosted at the www.30masjids.ca web platform.
During the Ramadan fast in the Spring of 2020, the convergence of Covid-19 and a ban on indoor public gatherings resulted in Muslims seeking approval for limited recitations of the adhan in some cities in Canada. These 2020 recitations across Canada provide some insights into how further inclusion of the adhan into the public soundscape might be received by municipal governments and various publics. I argue that multiculturalism narratives provide an unsatisfactory framework for inclusion of the adhan in the public soundscape. These narratives serve to mask Canada’s roots as a white settler colonial nation, but multiculturalism may persist as a “most acceptable”, “least controversial” paradigm around which Muslims, governments and various publics can coalesce for further future inclusion of the adhan in the Canadian public soundscape. This thesis examines the complexities involved and lays out a foundation for future debates on the topic, something which was lacking when I began.Graduate and Postdoctoral StudiesGraduat
Testimonial Photography and Thinking through Violence – ‘we do not eat fruit because our garden was burnt’
Full text linkTwo weeks prior to the complete withdrawal of the United States/NATO troops from Afghanistan on 30 August 2021, the Taliban took over the country. Focusing on the airport scene, the media presented a picture of chaos and volatility, caused by the failure of the US-trained Afghan military force to protect the people. Barely any mention was made of how women sustain their families and communities in everyday life, a site of my ethnographic research conducted in the fall of 2008 and 2009, respectively. To acknowledge women’s survival strategies, I focus on testimonial photography, a genre that recognises that the past is present and can be collectively recalled through photographs. Photographs have their own language, motivating us to imagine alternative ways of being. Layered reading of images allows unacknowledged violence to come to light. Viewers are then motivated to engage into critical reflection
Fotografiegestütztes Bezeugen und Nachdenken über Gewalt: „Wir essen kein Obst, weil unser Garten verbrannt wurde“
Full text linkZwei Wochen vor dem vollständigen Rückzug der US-amerikanischen und NATO-Truppen am 30. August 2021 nahmen die Taliban Kabul ein. Viele Medien lieferten Bilder von Chaos und Unbeständigkeit, vor allem vom Flughafen in Kabul. Begründet wurden diese Zustände damit, dass die von den USA ausgebildeten afghanischen Soldaten daran gescheitert seien, ihr Volk zu beschützen, und außerdem mit einer zu schwachen Regierung.
Kaum erwähnt wurde dagegen, wie Frauen familiäre und gemeinschaftliche Netzwerke im Alltag funktionsfähig erhielten – ein Thema, an dem ich bereits 2008 und 2009 in Afghanistan geforscht hatte. Um die Überlebensstrategien afghanischer Frauen zu würdigen, konzentriere ich mich in diesem Beitrag auf fotografiegestütztes Dokumentieren und Bezeugen: Eine Herangehensweise, die anerkennt, dass die Vergangenheit in der Gegenwart lebendig bleibt und kollektiv durch Fotografien erinnert wird. Fotografien sprechen eine ganz eigene Sprache, die dazu auffordert, sich alternative Seinsumstände vorzustellen. Wenn man Fotos wie jene, die Afghanistans jüngere Geschichte dokumentieren, schichtweise deutet, wird zuvor verborgene oder verschleierte Gewalt sichtbar. Dann nehmen Fotos die Betrachtenden in die Pflicht zur kritischen Reflexion
Creating Alternative and Demedicalized Spaces: Testimonial Narrative on Disability, Culture, and Racialization
Full text linkThe literature on disability, gender and “race” has benefited from the political economy perspective. With its emphasis on unmasking the workings of power, this perspective has brought into relief the systemic, institutionalized and spatial oppression of disabled persons, compounded in the case of gender and “race.” This narrative of deconstruction, however, remains incomplete in the absence of voice and subjectivity of persons with disabilities. Using narrative moments, recounted by an immigrant woman with two “disabled” children, this paper makes a case for an integrated framework for a study of racialized persons with disabilities. Here, the margins2 are not out there in other spaces; they form part of the centre whose existence is brought into question by alternative and demedicalized spaces. The data are drawn from a larger study of health and well being of South Asian East African women in metropolitan Vancouver, Canada
Reimagining Home in the Wake of Displacement
No full textIn the wake of displacement, people are tasked with reconstructing a sense of home in a new and unfamiliar location. In this article, we consider how the experience of displacement complicates our understanding of what it means to be at home by exposing the significant labour that goes into its imagination and re-imagination. We examine practices of homemaking after displacement through two interrelated themes: (a) narratives of home, where we discuss how displaced persons nurture a sense of home through memory and storytelling; and (b) textures of home, where we emphasize how a sense of home is sustained or re-imagined through material objects. Within this discussion, we maintain that there is a continuity between the violence of displacement and the violence of relocation, as the task of re-imagining home is often compounded by structural factors including socioeconomic marginalization and racialization in the country of settlement. We conceptualize displacement as an injustice and homemaking as a form of cultural labour that exemplifies the agency, innovation, and resilience of displaced persons
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Ritual and daily life : transmission and interpretation of the Ismaili tradition in Vancouver
No full textThis dissertation explores, within a framework provided by tradition and change, how Ismailis in Vancouver, primarily a religious community, formerly localized and spatially concentrated in East Africa, have been affected by migration into a secular state where they are spatially dispersed. Ismaili tradition is explicated through history and a recourse to documentary materials including the Qur'an, gināns or compositions, firmāns or guidances of the Imām (spiritual leader), and the rituals of the community. The chief feature of tradition may be identified as an overarching cosmology dichotomized as zāhir and bātin, glossed respectively as material (multiplicity and activity) and spiritual (unity and repose) in strict complementarity, the parts of which are activated through a spatial and a temporal movement from and to exteriority (zāhir) and interiority (bāţin). Daily life, family, kin, community rituals and prayers at Jamā'āt Khāna (place of assembly), and the firmāns reflect the complementarities and mediate them. Change is examined in relation to the same features as well as culinary practices which, as do the rituals, further reveal the complementarities between material and spiritual and the ways in which they are mediated. The changing roles and interrelationships of elders, men and women, and youth emphasize changes taking place. The major finding of the study is that the tradition, which was a complex of strict complementarities, has now become compartmentalized, diluting the force of the complementary relationship. This appears as a function of increased participation in the "technical" time (confining social relationships) of external public life as opposed to the "core culture" time (promoting social relationships) of the internal home life of families, and in the attitudes of Ismailis who are accommodating to the larger society and are exclusive in their community life. In addition, women's entry in the public labour force, and a growing separation between youth and adults as well as elders, have significantly affected community rituals, attendance in Jamā'āt Khāna, and familial relationships. While it might be thought that new sets of dialectics are being engaged, this does not in fact appear to be the case. Contraries and contradictions, which might have been thought to imply a dialectic, remain as they were enforcing a further compartmentalization of life choices.Arts, Faculty ofAnthropology, Department ofGraduat
Earle WAUGH, Sharon ABU-LABAN, Regula QURESHI (eds.), Muslim Families in North America, Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 1991. 369 pages, $39.95 (cloth)
No full text- …
