1,721,031 research outputs found
Narrative Wayfinding: Author-izing Arab and Afghan Migration across Morphing Borderscapes
No full textNarrative Wayfinding: Author-izing Arab and Afghan Migration across Morphing Borderscapes takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of narrative in the context of clandestine migration from the Arab world and Afghanistan to the EU. The dissertation argues that narration serves as a navigational tool for migrants as they traverse hostile locales and temporalities. Narrative craft allows migrants to captivate listeners and gain access to spaces and resources, and it also helps them process their own chaotic experiences. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, Narrative Wayfinding highlights migrant tales that reveal a breadth of spatiotemporal, cultural-linguistic, and psychospiritual transmutations. Each chapter addresses a specific type of morphing, from the issue of extraterritorial sovereignty to the phenomenon of passing as a member of an identity group that is not one’s own to questions of translation. Using the tools of close reading and comparative analysis, the dissertation considers both recent migration literature and a collection of interviews gleaned from my 2019-20 fieldwork in which I volunteered with asylum aid organizations in Greece.
Chapter One centers on Anthems of Salt, a 2019 Arabic-language memoir. Algerian author Larbi Ramdani narrates his failed attempt at passing as a Syrian refugee after he migrates clandestinely to Greece. I read Ramdani’s shapeshifting as a tactic (in Michel de Certeau’s sense) undertaken in response to the morphing of the EU borderscape, which selectively expands and contracts to facilitate the passage of goods and wealthy travelers while excluding poor migrants with “inferior” passports.
The second chapter explores temporal disruption in two recent works of Arabic fiction: Hoda Barakat’s Night Mail (2018) and Yousri Alghoul’s Gallows of Darkness (2021). In this chapter, I make a literary-studies contribution to existing anthropological scholarship that demonstrates the ways migrant temporalities are stretched and squeezed by state and international actors in attempts to quell unauthorized migration. I argue that narrative revelations of these temporal manipulations, along with migrant resistance to them, constitute a challenge to the nationalist temporality of triumphalism. Fiction provides a way to represent temporal experiences that migrants themselves are typically barred from articulating.
Chapter Three centers on stories of Afghan men who come of age throughout their migrant journeys. It compares Dari short stories by Asef Soltanzadeh and Sayed Eshaq Shojai to the lived experiences of two young Afghan interlocutors whom I interviewed in Greece. Focusing on the theme of separation from and reintegration into society and on interrogations of masculinity, I liken these narratives to the structure of the classical Arabic ode (qaṣidah), and particularly to brigand (ṣuʿlūk) poetry as theorized by Suzanne Stetkevych. I argue that these coming-of-age tales demonstrate the formation of a subject (in the Althusserian sense) that cannot be neatly attached to a modern nation-state.
The final chapter tackles issues of translation from the perspective of refugees who serve as interpreters for their fellow travelers. Drawing heavily on interviews I conducted in Greece, this chapter asks to what extent scholarship on literary translation theory can borrow from the rough-and-ready practices of “good-enough” interpretation that are common among those whom I call refugee-translators.
While Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” posits that movement produces narrative, my dissertation makes an inverse assertion: that migrant narration can facilitate increased mobility. By forging new narrative pathways through violent and ever-morphing obstacles, unauthorized migrants unearth hidden connections between supposedly divided worlds.PhDComparative LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/177753/1/gliddell_1.pd
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
Andalusian Encounters: Immigration, Islam, and Regional Identity in Southern Spain.
No full textThis dissertation ethnographically explores the cooperative and conflictive encounters emerging between and among Muslim converts, Muslim immigrants, and non-Muslim Andalusians in Granada, Spain. It examines their varying narratives about the place of Muslims in Spain (both past and present), and the implications of these narratives for ongoing reconfigurations of Andalusian regional identity, and for the politics of inclusion and exclusion of the growing Muslim minority in Spain. At the core of these encounters is Andalusians' ambivalence about the place of Muslims in Spain. Drawing on Andalusia's nearly 800-year Moorish period, Catholic and secular Andalusians (and other Spaniards) sometimes showcase the region's Islamic legacy to encourage tourism, bolster demands for regional political autonomy, or proudly assert a unique historical identity. Yet many also suspect that over-identification with their Muslim heritage, or their new Muslim neighbors, may jeopardize their Christian-secular modernity and Europeanness. This tension engenders a complex dynamic in which Muslims are both carefully incorporated into Granada's city life, and excluded and marginalized. The dissertation analyzes these competing tendencies on the part of Andalusian Spaniards and examines how Muslim converts and immigrants experience and engage with them. It shows that the production of Andalusian regional identities and the creation of Muslims social place in Granada are deeply intertwined processes. Moreover, debates about Muslims' historical and current presence in Andalusia reflect racial zed and gendered discourses about religious and cultural difference that structure the relationships and encounters between and among Muslims and non-Muslims. The dissertation traces these debates through a variety of historical moments and social settings: from the incorporation and persecution of Muslims during crucial periods in the construction of the Spanish nation-state; to embattled historiography of the country's Muslim heritage; to contentious, present-day debates about Muslim conversion and immigration at NG0s, homes, mosques, teahouses, women's associations, and the streets. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that the encounters between and among Muslim and non-Muslim residents in the city of Granada challenge easy narratives about Europe as an increasingly homogeneous, secular, cultural-civilizational space, even as they reflect pressures to embrace that narrative within Andalusia and Spain.PhDCultural anthropologyEuropean studiesIslamic studiesSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/127170/2/3441299.pd
Nostalgia for the modern: Privatization of the state ideology in Turkey.
No full textThis dissertation explores the transformations that took place in Turkish political culture at the end of the twentieth century that shifted boundaries between political and apolitical, public and private. It focuses on the privatization of the Kemalist state ideology and politics as a new sign of legitimacy for the Turkish state and citizens as they try to locate themselves in the shifting power relations of the post Cold-War era. More specifically, it inquires how can the neo-liberal ideology, which aims to substitute the market for both society and the state, be translated into Turkish political culture, with its strong state ideology and powerful social memory of the authoritarian regime of the early Republic, recalling it as the only period in history when Turkish modernization has been successful. This study is based on a close analysis of a significant moment in Turkish political life. During the fervently celebrated seventy-fifth anniversary of the Republic in 1998, Turkish politicians and politically active citizens debated and discussed the past, present, and future of Turkey. Turkish citizens reconciled between the memory of the state-led modernity of the 1930s and the pressures for a market-based modernity in the 1990s. First, they declared that citizens freely support the foundational principles of the Turkish Republic and Kemalist ideology. Practices such as spontaneous participation in anniversary celebrations or voluntary purchase of Ataturk paraphernalia were associated with free will rather than forced acts under state intervention. Second, they reevaluated the early years of the Republic as a period when citizens willingly adopted Turkish modernization. Representations of this past such as exhibits or life stories concentrated on the examples of private lives where citizens had transformed their lives in areas outside the authority of the state. In both cases the republican ideology was represented as popular commodity in the political market rather than as something imposed on people by the state.PhDArchaeologySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130322/2/3042148.pd
Nationalism and the genealogical imagination: oral history and textual authority in tribal Jordan
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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
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