Sociology Commons^™

Breaking Taboos: Syrian Women Reshaping Gender Roles In Zarqa, Jordan, Farah Qonaish

Theses and Dissertations

This research explores the changes in gender roles among Syrian refugee women in Jordan. Since 2011, more than a million Syrian refugees have settled in Jordan. Around 83% of Syrian refugees have resided in host communities in Jordan and around 70% of the Syrian population come from the rural areas in Syria refugees. Syrian refugees have experienced change on different levels of their lives since the beginning of the displacement. This ethnographic study was conducted in Zarqa, a major city in the middle region of Jordan, and a major host community for Syrian refugees in Jordan. The city is known …

Picturing Consumer Culture, Cultural Hybridity, And Womanhood: Farah Al Qasimi’S Photographs From 2012 To 2020, Minji Lee

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Farah Al Qasimi’s 2012-2020 color photographs, arguing that this work presents a distinctive and salient critique of domesticity, material culture, and womanhood in the UAE. Through her lens as a woman and a culturally hybrid subject, Al Qasimi explores the tensions of modernization, globalization, consumerism, and gender.

Shinners, Alexis E. Mabry

Theses and Dissertations

Shinners is a project that aims to examine the position of women in subcultures and capture conversations of women in subcultural sports. Within feminism, sociological constructs, campy horror, and personal experience I am manifesting the physical and mental obstacles faced in the subcultural sport of Bicycle Motocross (BMX) through photography, painting, collage, video, and sculpture. I interpret images posted to social media of injuries obtained while riding BMX as forms of empowerment, bodily gore as extreme evidence of participation, performative violence, valorizing the understanding of both the physical and psychological pain of failure, and the use of failure as a …

The School Of SharīʿA Judges: SharīʿA Courts’ Reform And Legal Modernization In Egypt (1907-1927), Yamen Nouh

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studied the history of the school of sharīʿa judges (1907-1927) as an essential episode of the reform of Sharīʿa courts in Egypt in the early 20th century. The thesis studied the school in connection with the broader context of legal modernization of the Egyptian legal system. The study explored the institutional, pedagogical, and legal aspects of the reform that the school advocated. The study analyzed the impact of the school’s pedagogy on the practice of the Islamic judiciary and the theoretical conception of Sharīʿa. The study used a significant yet understudied historical source: the judicial press. A comparative …

The Fall And Rise Of Bengali Muslim Conciousness: Conceptualising The Identity Of The Bangla Universal, Habib Khan

Theses and Dissertations

The emergence of modern-nation states saw the end of the empirical era of exploitation and exercise of inherent racist tendencies towards the 'other'. However, the effect of that colonial system is still ever-present in the creation and governance of these newly independent states. While every new state aims to be 'modern', they adopt the international legal framework of the West as their own - a system they had initially wanted to escape. The concept of Muslim universality in the form of the ummah should have freed Pakistan from the shackles of its former colonial masters. Instead, this phenomenon was replaced …

Historical Trauma: Literary And Testimonial Responses To Hiroshima, Mariam Ghonim

Theses and Dissertations

The concept of trauma is controversial in literature. While one may be able to come up with ways to describe trauma in fiction, representing historical trauma is a hard task for writers. Some argue that trauma can not be described through those who did not experience it, while others claim that, provided some elements are added, one can represent trauma to the reader. This thesis focuses on twentieth-century historical traumas related to a nuclear catastrophe and explores the different literary and testimonial responses to the catastrophic man-made event of Hiroshima (1945). In this thesis, Kathleen Burkinshaw’s historical fiction The Last …

Correlates Of Intimate Partner Cyber-Harassment Among Mexican American College Students, Erica M. Benavides-Moore

Theses and Dissertations

The social issue of intimate partner cyber-harassment among Mexican American college students continues to affect dating violence. While there is a considerable amount of literature focusing on various forms of criminal behavior in cyberspace, such as cyberbullying, cyber-pornography, hacking, online fraud and identity theft, less attention has been paid to violence facilitated through cyber-communications and digital/electronic means such as CH. This thesis examines Mexican American college students to identify which factors correlate to cyber harassment (CH) offending and which correspond to cyber victimization. In this context, intimate partner cyber harassment (IPCH) is defined as a pattern of repeated behaviors by …

Meanings Of Mindfulness And Spiritual Awakening: Affliction And Holistic Healing In Contemporary Cairo, Sohayla El Fakahany

Theses and Dissertations

In contemporary Cairo, people turn to various modes of spiritual, alternative, and complementary healing. Some are rooted in formal religious traditions, and others are inspired by a new globalized form of holistic healing such as yoga or meditation. What makes these practices more controversial than spiritual healing practices like el-Zar or el-Hadra is the exchange of money for the promise of healing or foreknowledge. Spiritual healing is often deemed “charlatanistic” by religious exclusivists. This entanglement of the practices with religion creates a threat because it provides an alternative to the modes of religiosity supplied by the main hegemonic Egyptian religious …

Journeys Of Middle-Class Syrian Women To And In Berlin: Modes Of Subjectivity, Possibilities And Becoming, Randa Adnan Bashlah

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an invitation to dive into the possibilities that emerge in the multiple stages of displacement journeys of a group of diverse Syrian women from a middle-class background, who happen to live in Berlin today, and learn about the displaced bodies' experiences from a personal scale. By capturing the journeys' nuances and trajectories, this study demonstrates how the mobile subjects interact differently and create different attachments with different power structures in the various modes which emerge through the journeys' different spatial and chronological stages. Looking at how displacement adds layers of complexity to the social's messiness and diversity, …

Theorizing #Girlboss Culture: Mediated Neoliberal Feminisms From Influencers To Multi-Level Marketing Schemes, Frankie Mastrangelo

Theses and Dissertations

I define girlboss feminism as emergent, mediated formations of neoliberal feminism that equate feminist empowerment with financial success, market competition, individualized work-life balance, and curated digital and physical presences driven by self-monetization. I look toward how the mediation of girlboss feminism utilizes branded and affective engagements with representational politics, discourses of authenticity and rebellion, as well as meritocratic aspiration to promote cultural interest in conceptualizing feminism in ways that are divorced from collective, intersectional struggle. I question the stakes involved in reducing feminist interrogations and commitments to discourses of representation, visibility, and meritocracy. I argue that while girlboss feminism may …

Time Machine Research And Approach, Tarek Bouraque

Theses and Dissertations

Time Machine is a hybrid documentary that explores the logics of enslavement, colonialism, eurocentrism and their interconnectedness in our globalized world. Mustapha Azemmouri, born in 1502, undertakes a journey to the 21st century to recount his own story of enslavement and exploration, and reflects on a collective puzzle of 500 years of hidden history.

It’S Funny Because It’S True: The Transmission Of Explicit And Implicit Racism In Internet Memes, Tabitha Fairchild

Theses and Dissertations

Video games are traditionally seen as the domain of heteronormative white males. The purpose of this study is to explore how racism is transmitted and reproduced within digital communities, and how humor is being used to frame racist discourse in virtual spaces. Digitally, internet memes are widely used rhetorical vehicles, reaching large and broad audiences. The roles these artifacts play in the reproduction and transmission of racist ideology is often obfuscated by the perception that internet memes are "just jokes." This study analyzes internet memes collected from 16 months of communication between members of Discord servers that self-identify as communities …

Conflicted Commons: A Local Makerspace In The Neoliberal City, Caitlin Cunningham

Theses and Dissertations

The commodification of culture, space, and resources is incentivized by neoliberal urbanism. In response, we have seen an attempt to develop collectively organized, oppositional spaces within urban places. The tensions that arise when considering the production of commons in the development of the neoliberal city are the central focus of this paper. As I will observe, these spaces are subjected to commodification as they become increasingly de-politicized through neoliberal ideologies. In order to theorize about these contradictory elements, I observe a makerspace in Richmond, Virginia called HackRVA. Specifically, I consider HackRVA as an urban commons. Through in-depth interviews and participant …

Desire And Fantasy Between Commercialism And Personal Room, Yukimi Otagiri

Theses and Dissertations

I apply two aspects of my life history to my art; my childhood experiences and my advanced studies in sociology. My work therefore combines a highly personal reading of my experiences of social interactions and my ongoing analysis of the nature of capitalism and socialism, commodification and media, especially in regard to the experiences of women in particular and consumers in general.

The Future Of Arabic Music: No Sound Without Silence, Nesma Magdy Khodier Vcuq

Theses and Dissertations

For centuries, Arabic music has been intrinsically linked to Arab culture and by extension bonded to the environmental landscape of the region, reflecting their emotions, moods, and behaviors. Numerous technological advancements in the latter half of the twentieth century, have greatly affected the rich legacy of Arabic music, significantly impacting the natural progression of traditional Arabic musical genres, scales, and instrumentation.

This thesis serves as an introduction to generative methods of music production, specifically music generated through gestures. Through generative music, and its unique ability to map gestures to different musical parameters, music can be produced using computer algorithms.

The …

Webbing Egypt, Ivan Panovic

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an ethnographic description of practices of the producers of Egypt-based and Egypt-related websites.

Representing Culture: Reflexivity And Mormon Folklore Scholarship, David A. Allred

Theses and Dissertations

When writing about a culture, ethnographers can convey important insights about society. However, ethnography can also misrepresent culture. To address this fact, reflexive ethnography attempts to influence both the methodology and the rhetoric of writing about culture. Reflexivity seeks to acknowledge the bias of the researcher. To include the voice of the cultural insiders, and to more closely represent the dynamics of cultures that always have an element of hybridity. However, reflexive ethnographies can also be unwieldy and impractical. Therefore, one must find a pragmatic application of reflexivity.

Reflexivity can have application to Mormon folklore studies. The most important Mormon …

A Cluster Analytic Study In Intercultural Communication Of Rokeach's Intrumental Values Among Lds Returned Missionaries, Lisa Bradford

Theses and Dissertations

Although much has been done in the study of values several important questions relative to the study of values remain. This thesis discusses the questions of what happens to the value systems of those who leave their culture for extended periods of time, do the perceptions of value systems become more accurate after exposure, and how does religiosity affect value systems.

The study was based on the idea that each of the cultures being tested (Latin and United States) had a distinct, general value system which differentiated it from the other and yet unified the individuals within it. In this …

A Study Of Moral Development In Mormon Culture, Steve Foster Gilliland

Theses and Dissertations

Previous studies have indicated that the moral development of the child may follow a "developmental" process. That is, the child progresses through an invariant series of stages, each characterized by certain modes of thought. As the child passes from one stage to another, he integrates the old stage into the new one. Kohlberg proposed a hierarchy of six stages through which the child would progress on his way to moral maturity. His hypothesis has been supported by empirical evidence.

Research findings have indicated that the Mormon culture appeared to be different in values and moral behavior than other United States …