1,720,987 research outputs found
Creating "Good Muslims": Qawmi Madrasa schooling in a rural town of Bangladesh
No full textThis thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This thesis is about the processes and practices that underpin everyday life in a Bangladeshi qawmi madrasa, a rather contentious faith-based Islamic schooling system that is very popular among the rural poor. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork that took place in Biswanath, a rural town in northeastern Bangladesh, this thesis focuses specifically on the processes that are considered by the qawmi madrasa system to be crucial for the creation of a “good Muslim” persona. The thesis is, therefore, primarily about a particular form of (religious) schooling and (religious) identity formation processes in rural Bangladesh. This study describes a wide range of issues, traditions, and practices embedded within the qawmi madrasa system. The economic and social dynamics of the locality have also been observed closely, as these are directly linked with and influenced by the centrality of Islam in the life of the people. The protagonists of this system believe that every Muslim requires authentic Islamic schooling in order to become a “good Muslim”. Essential to the construction of the “good Muslim” within the qawmi madrasa system therefore lies the assumption that this type of schooling is transformative in nature. Hence, my analysis highlights the centrality of the believer’s body and suggests that for the successful construction of a Muslim persona it is the Islamic orthopraxy, rather than the orthodoxy, that they (learners) receive here most of their faith schoolings on. Central to such orthopraxy is Sunnah (ritual and non-ritual actions approved by the Prophet), which is reinforced and inculcated by the wider community of adults (parents, teachers) into learners by systematically addressing and synchronizing various qualities and expectations through the schooling process. Loyalty is one such quality that both the qawmi protagonists and the wider society believe is infusible. Loyalty towards the moral and social order is thought to be achievable through both moral and corporal discipline. Hence, accustoming one’s body and mind to the knowledge of adab (manner) constitutes the fundamental knowledge of all within this system. In other words, in this study I suggest that the qawmi madrasa system is a system of schooling where adab signifies not only the moral but also the political identity of a person. However, an ideal Muslim persona or an approved Muslim body’s construction within this context also rests on religious beliefs (iman) and deeds (amal). In Bangladesh the qawmi madrasa system is categorized as an ultra orthodox Islamic schooling system on the basis of its stance for authentic and scripture based Islam. However, as I will demonstrate, in reality, the system is sustained by both accommodating many secular expectations of the people and by compromising many of its stances.This work is funded by the Commonwealth Commission and the British Council
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
Water ways: becoming an itinerant boat-dweller on the canals and rivers of of South East England
Get PDFThis thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London.This thesis draws from data collected over thirteen months of fieldwork working
with “Boaters”, a boat-dwelling itinerant group on the waterways of Southern England. In
the first of three parts, the thesis focusses on the individual motivations (economic, personal
and political) behind becoming a travelling Boater, and on how one acquires the
requisite skills and knowledge to become part of a community of practice on the waterways.
Boaters on the whole do not have a sense of being an ethnically distinct group and,
as such, this thesis interrogates what kind of an identity is being created or reinforced
when individuals recognise themselves as Boaters. This part further deals with the specific
temporal experience of boating (commonly known as “boat time”) that creates a shared
experiential pattern between Boaters, and also examines the informal networks of trade,
exchange and barter which enmesh Boaters in a web of reciprocal relationships. In the
subsequent part, the focus of the thesis widens to take in the boating “community” as it is
imagined. It asks how the concept of community is rhetorically constructed and corporately
enacted on the inland waterways and identifies the creation of an emic and local conception
of community. In the third part, the focus widens further still in order to interrogate the
troubled relationships between Boaters and sedentary populations and between Boaters
and agents of the State. By looking at Boaters’ different (essentially nomadic) understandings
of locality and political organisation, this thesis attempts to more broadly explain the
fraught relationship between state agencies and itinerant populations. The thesis concludes
that the community of Boaters is constructed through the shared understandings
which emerge due to the Boaters experiencing much of their world as being flexible, fluid
and unfixed. Boaters are bound by acts of dwelling together on the waterways, acts that
emerge from the specific material conditions of boat life, and further from acts of support
where Boaters bind together for the security of the group against antagonistic outsiders
and the interventions of agencies of the state.Brunel School of Social Sciences. The Royal Anthropological Institute
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