Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), defined by international law as constituting the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (the latter includes East Jerusalem), are among the highest recipients of international humanitarian aid per capita in the world. In Prolonged Humanitarianism: The Social Life of Aid in the Palestinian Territories, I examine the impact of primarily Western aid on Palestinian society in the present phase of de-development in the OPT (2010-2013). I examine four domains in particular: medical relief, psychosocial humanitarianism, gender-based interventions, and security-sector support. My research reveals the interlinked nature of these domains as well as the blurring of development and humanitarian assistance in the OPT. A central purpose of this research is to provide an ethnographic account of contemporary Palestinian subjectivity under prolonged humanitarian governance, thereby contributing to scholarship on conflict and violence, modern Middle Eastern studies, the anthropology of policy and humanitarianism, and critical development studies. / Anthropology

How does the condition of statelessness, which is usually thought of as a political problem, affect the economic and monetary lives of ordinary people? / History

Emotions can be defined as a natural, instinctive state of mind arising from one’s circumstances, mood, and relationships with others. It has long been a question to be answered by psychology that how and what is it that humans feel. Enabling computers to recognize human emotions has been an of interest to researchers since 1990s (Picard et al., 1995). Ever since, this area of research has grown significantly and emotion detection is becoming an important component in many natural language processing tasks. Several theories exist for defining emotions and are chosen by researchers according to their needs. For instance, according to appraisal theory, a psychology theory, emotions are produced by our evaluations (appraisals or estimates) of events that cause a specific reaction in different people. Some emotions are easy and universal, while others are complex and nuanced. Emotion classification is generally the process of labeling a piece of text with one or more corresponding emotion labels. Psychologists have developed numerous models and taxonomies of emotions. The model or taxonomy depends on the problem, and thorough study is often required to select the best model. Early studies of emotion classification focused on building computational models to classify basic emotion categories. In recent years, increasing volumes of social media and the digitization of data have opened a new horizon in this area of study, where emotion classification is a key component of applications, including mood and behavioral studies, as well as disaster relief, amongst many other applications. Sophisticated models have been built to detect and classify emotion in text, but few analyze how well a model is able to learn emotion cues. The ability to learn emotion cues properly and be able to generalize this learning is very important. This work investigates the robustness of emotion classification approaches across genres and languages, with a focus on quantifying how well state-of-the-art models are able to learn emotion cues. First, we use multi-task learning and hierarchical models to build emotion models that were trained on data combined from multiple genres. Our hypothesis is that a multi-genre, noisy training environment will help the classifier learn emotion cues that are prevalent across genres. Second, we explore splitting text (i.e. sentence) into its clauses and testing whether the model’s performance improves. Emotion analysis needs fine-grained annotation and clause-level annotation can be beneficial to design features to improve emotion detection performance. Intuitively, clause-level annotations may help the model focus on emotion cues, while ignoring irrelevant portions of the text. Third, we adopted a transfer learning approach for cross-lingual/genre emotion classification to focus the classifier’s attention on emotion cues which are consistent across languages. Fourth, we empirically show how to combine different genres to be able to build robust models that can be used as source models for emotion transfer to low-resource target languages. Finally, this study involved curating and re-annotating popular emotional data sets in different genres, and annotating a multi-genre corpus of Persian tweets and news, and generating a collection of emotional sentences for a low-resource language, Azerbaijani, a language spoken in the north west of Iran.

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The Middle East is a large geographical area, and while people think of it as a homogeneous area in terms of language and culture, the region IS actually more of a melting pot of ethnic, religious, racial and linguistic groups. Understanding the distinctions between these groups is of paramount importance to understanding the region. Historical rivalries between some groups, for example, Sunni and Shia Muslims, go back hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. Yet, people continue with life. How do countries continue to deal with each other when there are open, unsettled questions, such as boundaries or control of islands? Is there a resolution method that will finalize these issues for once and ever? Chapter One will discuss methodology and research implementation. Chapter Two will review theories of conflict resolution as described in the literature. Chapter Three will review the historical background of conflict in the Middle East in general, these four conflicts in particular and the role that Kuwaiti diplomats played (to the limited extent that it can be determined). Chapter Four offers overall conclusions and suggestions.

The focus of this research was to obtain, specifically, data on the marriage customs of the Druze in the Shouf Mountains of southeastern Lebanon. Ten Druze informants were selected and classified according to sex, age, marital status and religious status (sheik/sheika). A detailed questionnaire was designed to use during the interviews with these informants. However, after two interviews, it became apparent that a variable questionnaire was necessary to take advantage of the new, richly-detailed, cultural information that emerged with each informant. New questions were developed, in the field, to reflect and gather this new ethnographic data on Druze marriage customs.

The essay charts forty years of Zionist history to illuminate the remarkable evolution of Israel's unified, apolitical army and Israel's "democratic civil-military tradition," forged in the fires of opposing military styles, ideological rivalry, competing underground forces, war and civil war.

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