3,108 research outputs found
THE IMPACT OF SYED MUJTABA ALI'S TRAVELS ON INTERNATIONALISM IN LITERATURE
No full textAbastract: Naeem Mohaiemen, a Bangladeshi filmmaker and installation artist, was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2018 and exhibited at the Tate Britain gallery in London. He presented three works, including a feature film about a stranded traveler in Athens, a documentary about the Non-Aligned Movement during the 1970s, and a concertina book called "Volume Eleven (Flaw in the Algorithm of Cosmopolitanism). Mohaiemen referenced three essays written by Syed Mujtaba Ali, discussing Hitler and Germany. Ali's works and travels provide valuable insights into literary cosmopolitanisms and transnational alliances, particularly in the context of fascism and Cold War dynamics. His extensive collection of literary works showcases his remarkable productivity and high regard. Deshe Bideshe, published in 1949, is a Bengali travelogue that chronicles Mujtaba Ali's journey to Afghanistan from 1927 to 1929. The narrative explores the cultural and political history of Afghanistan and its connection to the Indian subcontinent, focusing on the three Anglo-Afghan wars fought by Britain. Ali's international perspective is closely connected to historical events, political dynamics, and the concept of nationhood. Mujtaba Ali's writings and reminiscences served as valuable resources for Bengali readers throughout the 1950s and beyond, expressing interwar cosmopolitanism and serving as platforms for political commentary and social critique. His writings present a distinct perspective on the world and India's position within it, highlighting the concept of 'Greater India' that captivated Orientalists. Mujtaba Ali critiques 'Greater India' intellectuals, highlighting the historical, political, and economic foundations of India's regional identity. His expertise in philology and literature made him well-suited to assume the role of a cultural envoy on behalf of a recently emancipated secular state, highlighting the need for fostering Asian and African solidarities as a means of countering both Eastern and Western power blocs.THIS DATASET IS ARCHIVED AT DANS/EASY, BUT NOT ACCESSIBLE HERE. TO VIEW A LIST OF FILES AND ACCESS THE FILES IN THIS DATASET CLICK ON THE DOI-LINK ABOV
A GLIMPSE INTO AFGHANISTAN THROUGH SYED MUJTABA ALI’S ‘DESHE BIDESHE’: AN INDIAN VOYAGER'S INSIGHTFUL LENS
No full textAbstract:Syed Mujtaba Ali's Deshe Bideshe, first released in 1948, is a well acclaimed travel narrative that chronicles his encounters in Afghanistan from 1927 to 1929. In this reading, I will focus on the unique characteristic that differentiates it from the conventional travel literature of the era generated via the colonial interaction. Mujtaba Ali's firsthand encounter with colonialism in India, along with his deep understanding of history, endows him with a unique ability to provide insights into Afghanistan's social and cultural metamorphosis at a certain era. The depiction of the Afghan identity in the face of foreign colonial forces and internal turmoil is both stimulating and demanding, since it does not seek to demystify or categorise like colonial works that strive to understand the Oriental. The individual's colonised awareness finds a reason to rejoice in the autonomous Afghan, enabling us to examine his work as a postcolonial piece of literature. Justine D. Edwards and Rune Graulund argue that postcolonial travel writing challenges both the authority of colonial powers in shaping reality and the connection between travel and dominance. They assert this in their book "Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations" (3). Hence, although Robert Byron's travelogue "The Road to Oxiana" (1937), which was written a few years after Ali's visit, presents Afghanistan as a historical artefact in need of British safeguarding, an account of Afghanistan by a colonised Indian criticises the connection between travel and domination and aims to foster a dialogue between southern regions, driven by the aspiration for regional cooperation.THIS DATASET IS ARCHIVED AT DANS/EASY, BUT NOT ACCESSIBLE HERE. TO VIEW A LIST OF FILES AND ACCESS THE FILES IN THIS DATASET CLICK ON THE DOI-LINK ABOV
Multi-channel customer management: A case study in Egypt
No full textChannel management is one CRM systems component much influenced by the behaviour of customers in relation to the implementation and use of channel management CRM component. The consumers’ behaviours, preferences, perceptions and expectations are crucial for the implementation and use of channel management. Customers’ contact with the organization’s multi-channels can occur at several touch points through out customer lifecycle. Customers’ behaviours may be differentiated according to the individual or micro level, but it might also differ at an ecological or macro level of analysis (Ramaseshan et al., 2006). In this paper the author has conducted a case study in Egypt to analyze customers’ behaviours at a macro level and customers channel choices, through out the customer lifecycle. The author has used a Structurational Analysis model (Ali and Brooks, 2008) to identify the cultural factors (Ali, et al. 2008) that influence the multi-channel customer management in Egypt
A violent origin : a Girardian analysis of the scapegoating of Ali ibn Abu Talib in Shi'ite tradition
No full textIncludes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 182-192).This dissertation applies Rene Girard's theory of the scapegoat mechanism to prove that Ali ibn Abu Talib appears in Shi'ite traditions as an innocent victim. The aim is to investigate Girard's substantial body of work to determine whether Ali was a scapegoat and a victim of a conspiracy within his community. Girard's theory is founded in mimetic desire, where he incorporated external and internal mediation to form an analysis of mimetic rivalry. Using various texts to develop his theory and support his concepts, he investigated Aristotle, Plato, Stendhal, Proust, Shakespeare and Freud. He developed his theory from the interaction between friends to the incorporation of an object of desire to form the 'French triangle'. He moved from investigating this 'triangle' in personal relationships to conspiracies and subsequently to communities with regard to primitive religions. It was in the discovery of the sacred victim that Girard recognized the purpose of myth, that it concealed the role of the persecutors and that it silenced the victim. Girard then transferred his deductions to analyzing the Bible, where he identified ways in which the text gave the victim a voice. He maintains that only Jesus supported a non-violent position and embraced positive mimetic desire in the form of imitating the love of God. In reviewing Ali's life, one discovers that it reveals Girard's concepts of mimetic rivalry, conspiracy and collective violence. There is the historical Ali and the divine Imam Ali. These two positions can be reconciled by following a constitutive reductionist method for the purpose of analysis in applying the scapegoat mechanism theory. Reductionism is useful and necessary for this study. While the historical Ali reveals a victim, the divine Ali takes responsibility for his own death. The historical and the divine reveal two perspectives in relating Ali's story, one from the victim's perspective and the other from the perspective of the persecutors. However, with respect to the scapegoat mechanism, Shi'ite traditions about Ali, inclusive of historical, popular, or ghulat traditions, show that Jesus was not the only victim to reveal his innocence and embrace non-violence for positive mimesis. Rather, Ali goes further in rejecting materialism to avoid envy, encouraging his community to witness his poverty. Without the distraction of material things, Ali could demonstrate God's love. While Girard claimed that Christianity, particularly the gospels, revealed the victim's innocence in Jesus Christ, Ali brings forth a similar message of imitating the love of God. Like Jesus, he revealed that God was a loving and forgiving God; he was not an angry God that demanded sacrifice
An interview with Ali M. Ahad
No full textAli Mumin Ahad is a Somali scholar with multifaceted interests and a personal life story that brought him from Somalia to Italy, and now to Australia. Ali obtained his undergraduate degree in Economics at the Somali National University, and then moved to Italy where he earned his master’s degree in agribusiness at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, in Milan. His doctorate was awarded by La Trobe University in Australia, while he now holds a position as Honorary Research Fellow at Melbourne University, Faculty of Arts. In his works, Ali focuses on Somali history, including colonialism, on literature, and on questions of migration and integration. He is the author of the book “Somali Oral Poetry and the Failed She-Camel Nation State: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Deelley Poetry Debate (1979-1980)”, published in 2015. Ali is also an eminent voice of Italian post-colonial studies: his “I peccati storici del colonialismo” is a must-read for those interested in understanding the legacy of Italian colonialism in Somalia. Marco Zoppi has conducted this interview for WardheerNews.com, and wishes to thank Ali M. Ahad for his kind availability
Cultural aspects of multi-channel customer management: A case study in Italy
No full textChannel management is one of CRM systems component much influenced by the behaviour of customers in relation to its implementation and use. The consumers’ behaviours, preferences, perceptions and expectations are crucial for the implementation and use of channel management. Customers’ contact with the organization’s multi-channels can occur at several touch points throughout the customer lifecycle. Customers’ behaviours may be differentiated according to the individual or micro level, but it might also differ at an ecological or macro level of analysis (Ramaseshan et al., 2006). In this paper the author has conducted a case study in a multinational organization in Italy to analyze customers’ behaviours at a macro level and customers channel choices, through out the customer lifecycle. The author has used a content analysis technique to define the themes of the case study and then used the Structurational Analysis model by Ali and Brooks, (2008) to identify the cultural values dimensions (Ali, et al. 2008a) that influence multi-channel customer management in Italy. The research findings highlight the cultural dimensions, which should be considered while adopting multi-channel customer strategy. Also, the research findings encourage the articulation of situated cultural approach to study cultural impact within IS discipline as alternative approach than predefined culture archetype
An analytical study of the theatre of the Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous, with particular emphasis on the plays written after the 1967 war
No full textThis study is an examination of the life and work of
the Syrian dramatist Saadallah Wannous (1941-1997). Wannous's name is virtually unknown in the West; only two academic studies of any significance have appeared in English on this eminent and challenging writer, who was honoured by UNESCO at the end of his life. Even in the Arab world his standing rests largely upon his celebrity as a cultural icon, since professional performances of his plays are rare due to the decline of the theatre in the region, and little attention has been devoted to theatre studies by Arab academics. The two studies in English do not attempt to be comprehensive but focus on particular stages of Wannous's career. This study is, therefore, the first to encompass the full range of Wannous's work. To do so it combines an account of his life which seeks to comprehend the various forces that shaped his thinking with an analysis of his dramatic works. The study concentrates on the plays written in the years following the trauma inflicted on the Arab world by the catastrophe of their
defeat in the Arab-Israeli war of June, 1967. Wannous's career can be divided into three phases: the immature plays of his young manhood which are influenced by European models and generally focus on the social condition of the individual; his middle period - the `theatre of politicisation', when his Marxist politics were the main
factor shaping his drama; and his late works, which are characterised by an extraordinary freedom of thought and expression. The introduction places Wannous in his historical and sociocultural context and provides a brief background explaining the literary and theatrical traditions of the Arab world that influenced his activity as a dramatist. Each phase is then examined in turn and the plays are analysed in accordance with the focus of the study. This means that emphasis is given to the middle period,
but no significant work is neglected. The study aims to trace the trajectory of Wannous's development using a
variety of sources: the plays themselves, Wannous's own journalism and critical writings, interviews with his widow, his friends and colleagues, and numerous
journals, books and articles, some of which contain
important interviews with Wannous that shed light on his thought and ways of working. Use is also made of the
two studies mentioned above. The study shows that Wannous's theatre was influenced by the key political, social and cultural developments of his time, and that he
constantly sought to find forms that would express those transformations in dramatic terms
Family altruism and incentives
No full textThe author builds on the altruistic model of the family, to explore the strategic interaction between altruistic parents, and selfish children, when children's efforts are endogenous. If there is uncertainty about the amount of income the children will realize, and if parents have imperfect information, the children have an incentive to exert little effort, and to rely on their parent's altruistically motivated transfers. Because of this, parents face a tradeoff between the insurance that bequests implicitly provide their children, and the disincentive to work prompted by their altruism. The author shows that if parents can credibly commit to a pattern of transfers, they will choose not to compensate children in bad outcomes, as much as predicted by the standard (no uncertainty, no asymmetric information) dynastic model of the family. Alternatively, parents may choose to forgo any insurance, and offer a fixed level of bequest, to elicit greater effort from their children. The optimal transfers structure that the author derives, reconciles the predictions of the altruistic family model, with much of the existing evidence on inter-generational transfers, which suggests that parents compensate only partially, or not at all, for earnings differentials among their children. Moreover, the author shows that Ricardian equivalence holds in this setup, except when non-negativity constraints are binding.Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Economics&Finance,Educational Sciences,Safety Nets and Transfers
Cross modality medical image synthesis for improving liver segmentation
No full textDeep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of medical images requires large datasets. However, the lack of large publicly available labelled datasets limits the development of deep learning-based CAD systems. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), in particular, CycleGAN, can be used to generate new cross-domain images without paired training data. However, most CycleGAN-based synthesis methods lack the potential to overcome alignment and asymmetry between the input and generated data. We propose a two-stage technique for the synthesis of abdominal MRI using cross-modality translation of abdominal CT. We show that the synthetic data can help improve the performance of the liver segmentation network. We increase the number of abdominal MRI images through cross-modality image transformation of unpaired CT images using a CycleGAN inspired deformation invariant network called EssNet. Subsequently, we combine the synthetic MRI images with the original MRI images and use them to improve the accuracy of the U-Net on a liver segmentation task. We train the U-Net on real MRI images and then on real and synthetic MRI images. Consequently, by comparing both scenarios, we achieve an improvement in the performance of U-Net. In summary, the improvement achieved in the Intersection over Union (IoU) is 1.17%. The results show the potential to address the data scarcity challenge in medical imaging
Characterization of the passive layer on ferrite and austenite phases of super duplex stainless steel
No full textIn this study, we report on a combined microscopic, analytical and electrochemical characterization of the nanoscopic passive layer on a tungsten‑molybdenum-containing super duplex stainless steel. We used scanning transmission electron microscopy/energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, scanning Kelvin probe force microscopy, scanning tunneling spectroscopy, and Mott–Schottky electrochemical impedance spectroscopy analysis to correlate the local chemical composition and electronic properties of passive layers on austenite and ferrite phases. The passive layer on the ferrite phase contains a higher amount of Mo, W, and Cr, which accommodates a higher nobility of ferrite and a higher local energy of the band gap compared to those on the austenite. The two aforementioned phases exhibit a different composition and semi-conductive properties of their passive layers leading to dissimilar local corrosion susceptibility. These findings are of pivotal importance in further studies of austenite and ferrite phase resolved corrosion resistance of duplex stainless steel demanding a dedicated alloying strategy.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.(OLD) MSE-6QN/Zandbergen La
- …
