This report demonstrates how encounters between readers, writers and editors of a low-brow genre of Urdu fiction, create an affective space of belonging. This genre is published in commercial monthly magazines (commonly known as women’s digests) that contain narratives of feminine domesticity, primarily written by and for women, in Pakistan. Drawing on ethnographic work (archival and interviews) with authors, readers and editors of two monthlies, this study traces the contours of digest community as an affective space of belonging that provides a ‘complex of confirmation and consolation’ on how to be a woman in Pakistan’s changing social milieu. It further argues that recent proliferation of cell phones has led to a new sensibility in this community that has its own rhythm of sound. Previously readers would communicate through published letters mediated by editors. However, now there is direct contact between these two groups, through cell phones. Digest narratives are now also being drawn from experiences readers share with authors over cell phone conversations. This sharing is not factual as such, but rather an affective exchange of feelings about facts. Thus, these conversations can be seen as a shared emotional experience where the lack of visual cues regarding social class, age and ethnicity (since readers and writers rarely meet each other) leads to voices becoming just that – voices that share life stories and experiences. There is thus a transient coming together of women who are mostly unrelated by kinship or ethnicity; and a sociality is formed between strangers with its own sensory feel of rhythm and sound, through the medium of the cell phone. This work contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship on how media and technology is a negotiation between material properties of technologies being introduced and the particular effects in forming new affects and sensibilities; and how dominant representations of Muslim women as a singular and stable category of analysis, can be spoken back to, by highlighting their myriad voices and understanding them beyond the usual tropes of victimhood and emancipation. / text

This thesis inquires into anti-humanist trends in Lebanese literature of the civil war and post-war period by examining the limit concept of the animal in three novelistic works: Beirut Nightmares [Kawābīs Bayrūt] (1976) by Ghādah Sammān, Yalo (2002) by Elias Khoury, and The Tiller of Waters [Ḥārith al-miyāh] (1998) by Hudá Barakāt. Marking a departure in previous critical work done on this body of literature, which has been dominated by trauma theory as an analytical framework, this thesis employs an innovative synthesis of narrative theory and affect theory to describe how the authors utilize narrative to humanize the war experience, thereby mitigating the effects of contingency and fragmentation on the narrative subject. After the collapse of the state, the human being is separated from its political form, leaving it perilously exposed to acts of violence. It may also, however, carry out aggressions on its fellow man with impunity. Both of these terrible aspects of man’s nature in wartime are understood conventionally as exposing a beast within man, since they radically undermine the precepts of moral value and self-sovereignty that constitute the pillars of humanism. Through acts of “composition” the first person narrators of these novels strive to insulate their affective core from participating in ambient currents of violence, which are viewed as a kind of contamination understood as “becoming-animal.” While implicating the subject in a participation that is other-than-human, these animal becomings are also, following Deleuze and Guttari, ways of attaining a new vitality and escaping the hierarchical symbolic power of logos. Use of this animal figure allows the authors to rethink the human in ways that does not assume a fixed humanist ontology. For Sammān, the animal represents a principle of vitality that allows her protagonist to overcome human sources of inertia, such as melancholic memories or ingrained habit, thereby preserving the authentic voice of the writerly self. For Khoury and Barakāt, the animal permits them to foreground the figure of the subaltern who stands in a minoritarian relation to logos. They also propose a post-humanist ethos of co-presence based on the affective subject’s receptivity and vulnerability; its capacity to both affect and be affected. / text

This dissertation investigates discourses of anti-violence strategies in the context of international development. While violence against women is, of course, an urgent problem, this dissertation explores how the urgency to end violence against women is socially, culturally, economically, and politically constructed. I consider the manufacturing of urgency in three case studies of contemporary anti-violence initiatives: i) American foreign policy including what has been branded as “The Hillary Doctrine” and proposed International Violence Against Women Act; ii) the World Bank’s report entitled The Cost of Violence; and iii) the United Nation’s UNiTE To End Violence Against Women and Say NO campaigns. In doing so, I argue that World Bank, the United Nations, and American foreign policies are too often technocratic, narrow, depoliticized, and are executed in an urgent manner in the interest of neoliberal economic growth, security concerns, and “feel good” aid at the expense of more holistic, effective and accountable responses to global violence against women.

This dissertation investigates discourses of anti-violence strategies in the context of international development. While violence against women is, of course, an urgent problem, this dissertation explores how the urgency to end violence against women is socially, culturally, economically, and politically constructed. I consider the manufacturing of urgency in three case studies of contemporary anti-violence initiatives: i) American foreign policy including what has been branded as “The Hillary Doctrine” and proposed International Violence Against Women Act; ii) the World Bank’s report entitled The Cost of Violence; and iii) the United Nation’s UNiTE To End Violence Against Women and Say NO campaigns. In doing so, I argue that World Bank, the United Nations, and American foreign policies are too often technocratic, narrow, depoliticized, and are executed in an urgent manner in the interest of neoliberal economic growth, security concerns, and “feel good” aid at the expense of more holistic, effective and accountable responses to global violence against women.

abstract: This dissertation historicizes the contemporary notions of student misbehavior through a critical study of 19th-century teacher manuals. Instead of reading the texts of the manuals as a window into the experiences of the past, I consider the manuals as discursive operations that enacted practices and ideals. In drawing upon historiographical and analytical methods inspired by Michel Foucault and Sara Ahmed, I explore how the intersection of student misbehavior with teacher pedagogy and disciplinary procedures enact “modes of subjection” (Foucault, 1995) and “affective orientations” (Ahmed, 2006) in the modernization of teacher pedagogy and schooling. I argue that the archive of manuals demonstrates the entanglement of student subjectivity and affect with modernizing regimes of governmentality and the marketplace. I equally argue that the modes of student misbehavior present in the archive provide avenues and strategies for thinking outside contemporary developmental and clinical framing of misbehavior. It is in rethinking misbehavior outside of contemporary frameworks that this dissertation provides an opportunity to reconsider how the boundaries of schooling and school participation might radically open up toward more diversity, inclusivity, and equity. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Learning, Literacies and Technologies 2020

abstract: Since 1998 and as recently as November 2018, 165 Tibetans have burned themselves alive in public protest, both inside Tibet and in exile. This study foregrounds Tibetan refugees’ interpretations of the self-immolation protests and examines how the exile community has socially, politically, and emotionally interrogated and assimilated this resistance movement. Based upon eleven months of ethnographic field research and 150 hours of formal interviews with different groups of Tibetan refugees in northern India, including: freedom activists, former political prisoners, members of the exile parliament, teachers of Tibetan Buddhism, families of self-immolators, and survivors of self-immolation, this project asks: What does activism look like in a time of martyrdom? What are the practices of solidarity with the dead? How does a refugee community that has been in exile for over three generations make sense of a wave of death occurring in a homeland most cannot access? Does the tactic of self-immolation challenge Tibetan held conceptions of resistance and the conceived relationship between politics, religion and nation? These questions are examined with attention to the sociopolitical expectations and vulnerabilities that the refugee community face. This study thus analyzes what it means to mourn those one never knew, and examines the fractious connections between resistance, solidarity, trauma, representation, political exigency, and community cohesion. By examining the uncomfortable affect around self-immolation, its memorialization and representation, the author argues that self-immolation is a relational act that creates and ushers forth witnesses. As such, one must analyze the obligations of witnessing, the barriers to witnessing, and the expectations of solidarity. This project offers the theory of exigent solidarity, whereby solidarity is understood as a contested space, borne of expectation, pressure, and responsibility, with its expression complex and its execution seemingly impossible. It calls for attention to the affective labor of solidarity in a time of ongoing martyrdom, and demonstrates that in the need to maintain solidarity and social cohesion, a sense of mutual-becoming occurs whereby the community is reconciled uneasily into a shared fate. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Justice Studies 2019

Drawing on theoretical concepts of affordance and affect, and by conducting a digital ethnographic research on African Pentecostal communities in Northern Italy, the research analyses how offline liturgical practice are translated in online platforms such as Zoom and Free Conference Call during the Covid-19 global pandemic. It is argued that online affordances such as the chat box and emojis are used by believers to communicate affective moments during worship services, while the mute button is used as a tool by leaders to wield their power to restore order and surveillance. Thus, some of the traditional power dynamics between worshippers, as well as performative aspects of Christianity are brought into the digital space. We also find that digital platforms can in fact, constraint religious practices, however believers use creative ways to circumvent some of the obstacles by re-appropriating the digital tools available to express spirituality and to intimately connect with fellow worshippers.

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The aim of this paper is to understand how trans people who write and read fanfiction about gender euphoria create meaningful writing processes, contextualize community, and orientate themselves in the world by telling stories about gender euphoria and related emotional experiences. I have conducted interactive chat interviews with four study participants and have, as a way of using an autoethnographic research method, included my own narratives as part of the material. Thus, the material used in this study consists of transcripts of collective sensemaking and discussions about differences and similarities in the experiences that the study participants and I tell each other about. I have analyzed the material using queer phenomenology and affect theory. I have found that the study participants have both varied and similar experiences of finding representation, of translating their emotions into actions, and of (re)shaping what it is that they, as trans people, can do and what narratives they can tell and experience.