Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 288-301). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

In this dissertation, I provide a discourse and narrative analysis of actual conflict talk episodes from mediation sessions that took place in a university conflict resolution center. Specifically, qualitative analytical methods are applied to five videotaped actual mediation sessions to (1) identify examples of the adversarial narrative pattern, pervasive in the literature, and (2) closely analyze the discourse in the cases where a different narrative pattern emerges to understand how these differing patterns are interactively co-constructed by the disputants and mediators. The literature in many fields contains research and theorizing on conflict, narrative, and numerous interaction variables in interpersonal conflict talk. However, the study of actual discourse within conflict events is relatively recent. Little empirical research explicates the situated communicative practices and mechanisms by which interlocutors interactively and emergently construct, resist, reproduce, and transform dispute narratives to produce outcomes consonant with their interests. This study applies microanalytic discourse analysis and narrative theory to examine how dispute narratives are interactively created in conflict talk episodes through work at the utterance level, including the manner in which narratives can be intertextually transformed through the interaction process. The findings herein illuminate the emergent nature of dispute narratives and some of the communicative practices and mechanisms disputants and mediators use to construct them. This study contributes to an understanding of the role of narratives in conflict talk and how narratives can be interactively constructed, co-constructed, challenged, and transformed in the course of a conflict talk event. / text

Colombian state and non-state actors are engaging in an important conceptual debate concerning the nature of a "new" type of armed group in the country. The state labels these groups "BACRIM" (criminal gangs), arguing that they are actors of organized crime. Members of civil society reject the state's conceptualization, arguing that these groups are paramilitaries operating in the context of the armed conflict. These organizations explain that "new" groups commit the same systematic human rights violations and adhere to the same modus operandi as the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, an umbrella organization of over 30,000 paramilitaries that the government supposedly demobilized in a 2005 negotiation. The state, in turn, argues that paramilitarism no longer exists in Colombia and that these "new" groups do not adhere to the counterinsurgent political ideology that was characteristic of paramilitarism. My research project is a nuanced analysis of the Colombian state and non-state debate concerning these "new" armed groups. I combine interviews with state and civil society representatives with historical contextualization in order to understand what is at stake in the positions that both sides are aggressively fostering in the debate. In conceptualizing these "new" groups, many key informants engaged in a renegotiation of the state-formed historical memory concerning paramilitarism. An analysis of the trajectory of paramilitary activity reveals the protection of important elite economic and political interests as the driving force of paramilitarism; this paramilitary project fits within the goals of a state-sponsored economic process of capital accumulation. In utilizing the paramilitary label, civil society highlights these as the structural causes of paramilitarism. The state, in turn, attempts to cement its simplified definition of paramilitarism as a counterinsurgency project in removing the term 'paramilitary' from the official discourse. Furthermore, in erasing paramilitarism from the discourse, the state attempts to disassociate itself with a dark history of human rights violations against civilians. To fully understand the debate in Colombia is to understand more generally the power and weight of words in denouncing or, conversely, in silencing important issues of human rights and, ultimately, in accurately or inaccurately constructing historical memory of armed conflict. / text

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The Kashmir dispute has led to two wars (1947-1948, 1965), serious military encounters (1999,2001) between India and Pakistan, as well as a militant and nonmilitant separatist movement seeking independence for Kashmir (1989- ). While this conflict has been subjected to sustained analysis by academics and journalists, Kashmir's centrality to the public culture ofIndia, explored here through a study of Hindi cinema, has received little to no attention in the considerable literature on the area. The articulations of Kashmir in Hindi cinema - as a paradise on earth, sacred site of Hinduism, home ofIndia's spiritual and syncretistic traditions, pivotal to the idea of an eternal Indian civilization - help to reveal the attachments that guide 'Indian' claims on Kashmir. This study addresses the question of how, why and in what ways Kashmir is presented as a 'special' region in Hindi cinema. In doing so it initiates a discussion on region and religion in Hindi cinema, scholarship on which has long prioritized the 'nation'. As India's only Muslim-majority regional state, divided between India and Pakistan, Kashmir became a symbol of Indian secularism, a fact that is often reiterated in political discourse, as well as in academic research on the Kashmir dispute. Paradoxically, this symbol of Indian secularism, it is argued, is a site for religious contestations in Hindi cinema. The synonymy between Indian and Hindu in Kashmir films rests on the disavowal of a 'Muslim' Kashmir, so as to allay a Hindu majoritarian anxiety about a Muslim majority region in post-partition India. Therefore, the abstract equality of secularism, and the neutrality of 'national culture' remain merely 'ideals' in India's dominant form of public culture, namely Hindi cinema. The representations of Kashmir in Hindi cinema make explicit the regional and religious contestations over the national and the secular, providing a far more diverse account of history, culture and politics in India than is commonly acknowledged by 'official' discourses, mainstream historiography, and nation-centred (film) scholarship.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Clinical Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

published_or_final_version / Psychology / Master / Master of Philosophy

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