Concebida inicialmente como mais um estudo de base regional sobre a organização social do espaço, a presente investigação acabou por se centrar especificamente na caracterização morfológica das diversas unidades espaciais que serviram a organização da paisagem e do povoamento, entendidas como bases materiais da organização social do espaço, no território da diocese de Braga entre c. 875 e 1100. Trata-se de um trabalho empenhado não tanto em esgotar um tema no plano empírico, dentro de coordenadas temporais e espaciais precisas, mas sobretudo em propor uma metodologia de análise do espaço (mais concretamente, dos diversos tipos de unidades que o estruturam no discurso documental), concebida especificamente a partir de fontes escritas altimedievais. O programa desta dissertação distingue-se, assim, por um duplo objetivo instrumental (porque condição prévia imprescindível ao estudo do tema escolhido), verdadeiramente interdependente: (i) apresentar uma proposta metodológica para o estudo da morfologia das diversas unidades espaciais referidas na documentação escrita altimedieval; e (ii) desenvolver um caminho aplicado (a um corpus documental concreto) de reflexão sobre as possibilidades das fontes escritas para o conhecimento da materialidade do espaço, conducente à reivindicação heurística da relevância, mas também das limitações, deste tipo de fontes para o estudo do tema; o que tem implicações epistemológicas no debate sobre os espaços de cruzamento/rutura entre a história e a arqueologia. Estes dois objetivos estão na origem das duas partes da dissertação: a primeira dedicada à justificação teórica e apresentação da metodologia proposta e a segunda aos problemas associados à representação documental do espaço, com particular destaque para a análise detalhada do léxico utilizado na documentação compulsada para classificar morfologicamente as unidades espaciais (...).

This research project, based on qualitative fieldwork undertaken in Edinburgh between 2011 and 2013, explores the ways in which Scottish Muslims have conceptualised and operationalised Muslimness in negotiation of and adaptation to the surrounding social, cultural and political environment. Using Edinburgh as a case study and 9/11 as an important historical reference point, this project analyses the transformations and developments of individual and collective Muslimness within a national and local context influenced by the global, social and political responses to the tragic terrorist attacks that took place in the USA and, subsequently, in Europe. As a whole, this thesis maintains that Muslimness in Scotland has undergone a transformation over the past decade, a transformation which is still ongoing, in which the focus on Islam has increased within both the Muslim community and broader society. At the individual level, this thesis shows that Muslim identities are dialectically shaped at the interplay between macro-structurally shaped sociopolitical understandings of Islam and micro-level, daily conceptualisations of self within the context of intergenerational changes, global and local Islamic affiliations and Scottish cultural influences. Nation, religion, ethnicity, culture and ideology intermingle to shape fluid, reactive, expressive, performed and developmental identities that are adapted to, and played out within, the local Scottish context. These same elements inform the ways in which Muslim communitarianism has been ‘done’ in Edinburgh in the wake of the post-9/11 global, national and local (often securitised) reconceptualisations of Muslimness. As a network of collective diversity based on broad religious homogeneity, relative cultural similarity and variable ethnic diversity, Edinburgh’s Muslim community has developed divergent trajectories as a consequence of intergenerational changes and varying social, political and institutional attitudes towards Islam. While airports seem to be the major loci for the socially interacted stigmatisation of Muslims, Edinburgh appears to maintain relatively modest, albeit emotionally impactful, levels of daily discrimination towards people of Islamic faith within a context of heightened negative labelling of visible Muslimness.

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This thesis materialized out of an urgency to legitimize more creative, plural, and curious ways of thinking critically about the implications of 9/11 specifically, and global terrorism generally. This thesis actively grapples with the question: how has feminist poetry written by Arab American women post 9/11 complicated, resisted, and re-imagined the creation of one homogenizing national narrative of the event? The data used in order to answer this research question comes from an analysis of the poetic work of five Arab American women, each of whom write explicitly within an anti-imperialist feminist framework. My thesis analyzes these poems in conversation with one another in order to synthesize and establish a pattern. In doing so, I extract three of the most prominent commonalities between the poems: (1) An insistence on dehomogenizing the Arab and the Arab American in direct contrast to the Western stereotypes that polarize and essentialize the Arab “other” (2) a desire to re-negotiate the politics of identity and visibility and (3) an ability to teach a way of suturing solidarity that is anti-imperialist, necessarily plural, and embodied as art. This thesis serves as a reminder that the groundwork for building more imaginative, creative, and generative coalitions has already been laid. It concludes that in learning from places of artistic re-visioning, it becomes more possible to chart connections and provoke loyalties that are resonant, resilient, and revolutionary.

BEHIND THE FIRE LINEA thesis submitted in partial fulfillment for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University, 2004. Major Director: Jim Long, Department Chair. Behind the Line of Fire is a documentary of the professional lives of a group of firefighters. Inspired by the events of September 11th, it has been an ongoing journey for me as I continue to interact with an photograph these individuals doing the job that they live for. My goal for this project has been to work within the guidelines of a documentary, a genre that has a rich, diverse, and defined history. I did not want to show scenes in which firefighters were depicted in typically iconographic scenarios. I have not made any images to date representing exploding structures with firefighters risking life and limb fighting the fire, nor have I shown the firefighters performing heroic acts such as rescuing a child or an animal. I believe the imagery I have created presents firefighters in a different light. These are men and women working. There are no hidden meanings or agendas involved. The photos are to be taken at face value as images of people whose lives revolve around what they do.

Thesis advisor: Christopher Wilson / Thesis advisor: Carlo Rotella / This dissertation explores traditional patterns of immigration narratives and reads them alongside not only their contemporary, divergent counterparts but also historical moments that contribute to the narrative transformations. By way of this examination, literary changes over time become readable, highlighting the speed at which the rhetoric and aims of many immigration narratives became patently anti-America in the twenty-first century, significantly departing from the traditions established in the twentieth century, which, at their core still held pro-America aims. The first chapter, "The Solution is the Problem: Immigrant Narratives of Internment and Detention," considers nonfiction narratives regarding immigration detention within the borders of the United States. I read Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter and Edwidge Danticat's Brother I'm Dying as narratives that explore detention as central immigrant experience, exposing a chronicle of national suffering after attacks on American soil. When paired with Sone's work, Danticat's Brother I'm Dying reveals a shift in traditional narratives, exposing links to criminality and a move away from affiliation. In my second chapter, "The Helpless Helper: Illegality, Borders and Family Reunification," I study Thomas McCarthy's The Visitor, Courtney Hunt's Frozen River, and Wayne Kramer's Crossing Over. In these films, the suffering of immigrant families designated as somehow "illegal" are often displaced onto a white, parental "helper" figure in order to scrutinize their processing and treatment. These three independent films probe the ways in which economic, judicial, and political interests negatively affect family reunification policies. Additionally, The Visitor, Frozen River, and Crossing Over rely on an alternative point of view - that of American citizens rather than immigrants - as a way to further fragment traditional immigrant narrative structures, which instead favored immigrant-as-narrator constructs. In chapter three, "Considering Conditions of Possibility: Canonical Modes with Modern Concerns," I transition back to the immigrant's point of view and turn to traditional "high" literature. The narratives studied in this chapter retell canonical American novels before placing an important twist on the story: the decision to leave America rather than assimilate and aspire to the American Dream. Saher Alam's The Groom to Have Been and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland both make use of the narrative mode of the novel of manners while H.M. Naqvi's Home Boy and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist draw upon the ethnic bildungsroman tradition. By treating immigrant experiences as literary through adaptations of canonical novels rooted in American success and integration, these four authors make the choice of writing their protagonists out of America all the more resonant. The final chapter of this project, "The End Product of Our Deep Moral Exhaustion: Alternative Genres and Immigration Narratives," pulls upon Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America to ground a discussion of the role of alternate history in contemporary immigration narratives. From there, the chapter pushes out to include Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story as an example of speculative fiction. In each novel, a commentary on America's global social position is revealed by means of the degree to which the protagonists and their families do or do not become assimilated Americans, placing these novels in an intermediary position on the continuum of post-9/11 immigration narratives. Via my close readings, I aim to demonstrate the ways in which patterns of departure from traditional narratives became both enhanced and more rapidly altered at the start of the twenty-first century. The comparative work of this dissertation project allows access to a unique vision of twenty-first century America that is only available through the lens of immigration narratives, critiquing the modern nation's strengths, shortcomings, political climate, and social realities all while attending to conscious and significant modifications to traditional immigrant narratives. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Thesis advisor: Bonnie Jefferson / This paper analyzes the reconstruction of the American identity through the lens of two post-modern films: Paul Haggis’ Crash and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. First, the role of 9/11 on the resurgence of trauma culture and its catalytic effect on the start of the post-modern era is examined. This analysis argues that these films unite American citizens through the central notion of humanity that mankind ultimately shares. This is achieved through the framework of three central themes: the elimination of the typified other, the restoration of faith in mankind and the human condition, and the uniting sense of touch. The construction of these themes reconciles the ambiguity and uncertainty inherent in all aspects of the post-modern era. These films serve as metaphorical narrative vehicles and function to draw the American people back into a sense of a universal, national identity in the wake of September 11. In addition, they foster reassurance in the American spirit and ensure the ability of the United States to initiate collective recovery after periods of intense national trauma. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Communication Honors Program. / Discipline: Communication.

Thesis advisor: Paul Mariani / The fireplace has long stood at the center of the American home, that hearth which requires work and duty and which offers warmth and transformation in return. Fireplaces: The Unmaking of the American Male Domestic Poet takes a look at three major twentieth-century men whose poetry manifests anxieties about staying home to "keep the fire-place burning and the music-box churning and the wheels of the baby's chariot turning," as Wallace Stevens described it (L 246), during a time of great literary change when their peers were widely expatriating to Europe. Fireplaces considers contemporary poet Stephen Dunn as an inheritor of this mottled Modernist lineage of male lyric domesticity in the Northeastern United States, a tradition rattled by the terrorist events of September 11, 2001 after which Dunn leaves his wife and family home to remarry, thus razing the longstanding domestic frame of his poems. Ultimately Fireplaces leaves us with a question for twenty-first century verse--can a male poet still write about home? Or has the local domestic voice been supplanted at last by a placeless strain of lyric. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

My research is a literary study which primarily examines previously unstudied best-selling action-thriller fiction primary material from the US, Britain and Russia (published in the decade following the 11 September 2001 attacks) in the contexts of hegemonic masculinity and Self and Other stereotyping. I analyse thirteen works by the following popular fiction authors: Vince Flynn, Daniel Silva, Nelson DeMille, Frederick Forsyth and Danil Koretskiy. Drawing on masculinity studies and archetypal psychology, I formulate the model of the archetypal hero – a character type which the above authors‘ works capitalise on. I trace the employment of this model in these primary works within the framework of constructing a positive and heroic image of the Self, of which the action-thriller hero is the chief representative. The archetypal hero‘s principal traits include courage, honour, individualism and just violence among others. Heroes such as Mitch Rapp, Gabriel Allon, John Corey, Mike Martin, Max Kardanov and Alexei Mal‘tsev embody this archetypal model and confirm it as positive and dominant in their respective narratives. The authors also utilise a variety of framing strategies to enhance their heroes‘ authoritativeness and characterisation. Among these strategies, the use of historical facts and figures to anchor the narrative, enemy acknowledgement of the hero‘s qualities and female characters‘ fulfilment of traditional gender roles are the most prominent. First-person narration also plays a role in enhancing authenticity, such as in DeMille‘s novels. While the heroes and the side they represent are characterised as inherently positive and superior, their terrorist antagonists fulfil the role of the essentialised and diametrically opposite Other. I demonstrate through further analysis how these characters are positioned as archetypal terrorists, embodying traits which are antithetical to the hero‘s: backwardness; hatred of modernity and ‗civilisation‘; religion (Islam) as their source of hatred; desire for arbitrary revenge and unjustified violence; hypocrisy and disloyalty. Having analysed the main archetypal heroes and villains in the primary action-thriller works, I proceed to examine two mainstream literary authors: American John Updike and Algerian Francophone Yasmina Khadra. I study those of their novels which foreground terrorist characters instead of archetypal heroes, thus analysing one novel by Updike (Terrorist) and two by Khadra (Les Sirènes de Bagdad and L’Attentat). I find that, despite an increased focus on the character of the budding teenage suicide bomber from New Jersey, Updike‘s characterisation follows a pattern similar to the archetypal terrorist in the action-thriller sources. On the other hand, Khadra achieves a more balanced and complex portrayal, presenting his terrorists as human beings motivated by their various personal, social and political grievances rather than blind religious hatred. In sum, only Khadra‘s narratives transcend stereotypical views of terrorism, while the other post-9/11 primary works (including Updike) focus on perpetuating binary oppositions of the Self and Other, masculinity and emasculation. My original contribution to knowledge is the identification, definition and comparative textual analysis of archetypal hero and terrorist characters in post-9/11 action-thriller and mainstream fiction in three languages (English, Russian and French) within a framework combining several elements: aspects of the system of representation of the terrorist Other, masculinity studies and archetypal psychology as well as the context of political and media post-9/11 views of Arabs and/or Muslims in the US, Britain and Russia.

Responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 came in many forms - political, social, cultural, and military. The events of that day shaped the first decade of the 21st century, and continue to have enormous resonance worldwide. This research project examines a particular aspect of the response to September 11 – the literary one, and more specifically, New York fiction. However, in conducting this research it became apparent that the effect of these traumatic events deeply scarred writers, and their writing, and the process of creating fiction about New York was one which was threatened by the enormity of the events. Also, these texts seemed to be in dialogue with other forms of responses to the events in other media. The sense of a community coming together to examine the wound that had been received was strong in New York after the attacks, and that same spirit of coming together could be seen in works that could be labelled as “Post 9/11”. These included comics and graphic novels, artworks, and projects like The Sonic Memorial. This thesis will consider the relationship between these some of works in order to highlight some of the most important aspects of the literary and cultural response. The introduction sets out the historical context and establishes the texts and artworks which will be examined, giving an overview of the research. The first chapter looks at Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and Art Spiegelman’s comic In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). It argues that text and image exist in an uneasy relationship in these works, replicating both the lack of comprehension of the events and gaps in memory or expression that emerged through the retelling of the events of September 11. This is one response to the difficulties that come with the attempt to express trauma through narrative, particularly when the political and historical circumstances being described are so complex, and the emotions that surround the event are so raw. The second chapter considers the controversial relationship between performance, art, and acts of terror in Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man and Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 cycle of artworks. The final chapter explores narrative and testimony in Paul Auster’s novel Man in the Dark and The Sonic Memorial Project, which gathered sounds and reminiscences related to the Twin Towers and September 11. The methodology of considering fiction alongside other modes of response is embedded in the structure of the thesis, with each chapter exploring a major novel alongside a related artwork or narrative. This mirrors the cacophonous and varied responses to 9/11, but also captures something of the way in which the reaction to the trauma brought sometimes distinct and separate people, voices and perspectives together in the spirit of sharing experiences and perspectives. It is concluded that the act of creating a piece of literature, artwork, or another kind of narrative, about September 11 is often confronted by the traumatic nature of the events, and that many responses to them internalised this problem, becoming as much about the nature of trauma, and how it makes certain memories and thoughts extremely difficult to express, at least in a way that is equal to the emotion involved. September 11 poses a challenge to artists that is much wider than the problem of representing the event itself. It asks artists and writers to consider how one can represent a traumatic and widely witnessed event, and whether world-changing events require an upheaval of literary and artistic conventions. It also questions the role of the writer or artist in the face of what Don DeLillo described as ‘all that howling space’. The thesis concludes that the strategy employed by most of the works examined here is to use unconventional methods to construct a memorial to those lost, but to do so in a way that involves the reader, bringing them into the events, but also pointing to the process of creating a post-9/11 artwork, and the difficulties inherent in it. This maintains the long established tradition of metafiction in New York fiction, demonstrating that these are works that do not seek a complete break with the past, but bring a new raw edge of tragedy and trauma into the metafiction. In this way formal play, and the attention to the process of creating a text or artwork becomes a means of representing the trauma of the event, and the trauma of creating literature and art about it. The metafictional aspects therefore become a means of cathartically approaching the site of the wound. This is perhaps why so much post 9/11 fiction remains either controversial or divides critics. It looks at both the event and its own processes. Whether or not this is satisfying to the reader, or the critic, it does point to the anxieties felt by writers and the wider creative community in the wake of 9/11.