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The February 20th Movement Communication Strategies: Towards Participatory Politics, Houda Abadi

Communication Dissertations

The wave of mass protests in the Middle East and North Africa highlighted the crucial role of information communication technologies in mobilization and political change. Debate among scholars revolved around the Internet’s potential for toppling authoritarian regimes. However, rather than seeing the Arab Spring as a direct result of social media, this study examines how the online and offline media strategies converged, interacted, or prevailed within the various socioeconomic and political contexts. It looks at the purposes and functions of each medium, with a discussion of the dialectical relationship between them.

Drawing on interviews and fieldwork in Morocco, as well …

O Brother, Where Art Thou? Understanding Culturally-Produced Limitations On Gay Male Community Formation In South Central Appalachia, Michael Brandon Brewer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research examines limitations presented to gay men living in south central Appalachia that are produced by Appalachian culture itself, in regard to community formation. This qualitative study intersects existing scholarship on rural sexualities, gay communities and Appalachian culture in order to gain insight into the complexities that effect men in the region. The data is synthesized through a contextual dialectics framework in order to position both the Appalachian culture in its entirety, and gay men residing in the region, as agentic actors that are simultaneously informed by and produce tensions between the two. This study explores ways in which …

The Dialectics Of The Neo-Neo Debate In The Neoliberal Moment, Sarrah Kassem

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis applies a historical materialist and dialectical analysis to the study of IR by holding the moment of the 1980s as temporally stable to study the debate between Neorealism and Neoliberalism (Neo-Neo debate). I ask two foundational and interrelated questions: 1) how are the material conditions of the neoliberal moment dialectically related to the reassertion of bourgeois mental conceptions in International Relations?; and 2) how does the ontology of dominant IR theory, understood as the Neo-Neo debate, lead to the exclusion of class analysis altogether? By studying the dialectical relations of the material context and the Neo-Neo debate, I …

The False Idealization Of Heteronormativity And The Repression Of Queerness, Catherine Lynn Thurmond

LSU Master's Theses

In this thesis, entitled “The False Idealization of Heteronormativity and the Repression of Queerness,” I examine heteronormativity as a social structure that is idealized over, and against, queerness. In the first chapter, I define heteronormativity and queerness. “Heteronormativity,” here, is simply a set of standards that dictate what one must do with their gender and sexuality, such as having sexual relations with the opposite sex, getting married, or having children. Heteronormativity is visible, validated, and normalized in society. Conversely, “queerness” refers to the social structures that dictate what one must not do with their gender and sexuality. Thus, queerness is …