Through the analysis of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey with Islamist roots, this dissertation examines the relationship between "moderation" of religious political parties, i.e. moving towards programmatic positions compatible with liberal democracy and their ongoing mobilization practices. Based on data collected through fieldwork conducted in Turkey over 22 months, from September 2006 through June 2008, this study argues that the transformation of the Islamist party into a mass based center-right party in Turkey was possible to the extent that the AKP pursued "moderation" not only at the external level by moving towards a more accommodative stance vis-a-vis the other political actors and the regime, but also at the intra-party and grassroots levels. This transformation entailed re-drawing the boundaries between religion and politics through efforts to forge a "conservative democratic" party identity within the mass organizational network it has inherited from its predecessors and to develop multiple modes of linkages between the party and mass base moving away from religious mobilization, reconciling the principles of secularism, nationalism and liberal economic policies with its constituents religious sensibilities. AKP's effort in developing a more inclusive and representative party involved structural transformation through new recruitment patterns, constructing a new party genealogy and diffusing a new symbolic and discursive structure through training and other intra-party activities as well as through the everyday practices of the local party units and municipalities. By continuing to rely on the diffuse Islamic networks for filling the important party positions, the AKP sought to retain its Islamic credentials while shedding Islamic insignia (except for the women's headscarves), ending gender segregation, incorporating more women into the party's administrative cadres. At the local level, through its grassroots organizing structure, the AKP has been able to continue to carry on its strong social embeddedness. The AKP's base units working with the local municipality run by the party communicated the AKP government's policy positions that dramatically differed from its predecessors without Islamic justification, but instead worked as a liaison between the state and the local constituency, delivering constituency-service effectively through its social service provision and cultural activities.

In this dissertation, I examine the work of an important yet insufficiently studied Iranian novelist and short-story writer, Ahmad Mahmud. Because of his early affiliation with leftist socialist groups, Mahmud's work has been subject to various, sometimes contradictory, interpretations by critics. Such readings of Mahmud's work have resulted in making him a controversial literary figure. Hence, this project aims to re-examine the critics' current viewpoint of Mahmud's works, which they regard as "ideologically driven" and "Marxist and/or political writing." Although Mahmud's ideology played a significant role in creating his stories, particularly in his early works, I argue that storytelling is the predominant concern for Mahmud. In fact, a large portion of his writing depicts his own life and his own development as a person and a writer. Mahmud's portrayal of the main protagonist of his stories, Khaled, who goes through various stages of transformation, indeed reflects his own evolution and development. In other words, I contend that Mahmud's literary output is essentially "autobiographical." In addition, I argue that Mahmud's autobiographical fiction helps to shape and articulate his emerging role as a novelist as he strives to record decades of turbulent social and political upheaval and change in the post-1950s era, as the Iranian nation undergoes various stages of transformation and growth in search of a new identity and political autonomy. With an analysis of a select number of Mahmud's novels, furthermore, I discuss the social and historical nature of this transformation of the author/protagonist/nation and argue that from early on Mahmud was determined to depict the linear socio-political movement that took place in the modern history of Iran in the character of his memorable hero, Khaled, who appears in various guises and matures both as a person and a social entity from one novel to the next. / text

<p> The emergence of globalization has resulted in the formation of what Hardt and Negri (2001) term &ldquo;Empire,&rdquo; a regime of governance without territorial or temporal boundaries operating on all registers of life, from the level of political regulation down to the internalized level of self-regulation by an individual. This work posits that although Empire may be distinctive in its unbounded character and lacking an &ldquo;outside,&rdquo; voids, characterized as black holes, exist within Empire that haunt the spatial totality. Such geographical, physical and psychic black holes evoke uncanny sensations within the body. </p><p> Utilizing the argument that culture permeates individuals and informs how they conceive of themselves, the world, and others, the work adopted a complexity sensibility in the study of the black hole systems in an attempt to integrate the introspective, the interpersonal, intercultural, and international experiences that constitute a global existence. </p><p> The culturally contextualized complex depth psychological analysis of psychosis experienced during catastrophic psychic trauma undertaken in this work offered a more nuanced understanding to a traditional psychiatric interpretation. Having become aware of the complex cultural manifestations of psychosis, this work explored psychosis as a window through which the strangeness of unconscious functioning can be observed. </p><p> This dissertation examined the lived experience of a former hostage in war torn Lebanon using a hermeneutic design. The ordeal of being abducted from a geographic black hole (Lebanon) into a terrorist black hole, incarcerated within a physical black hole (solitary confinement) and the subsequent descent into a psychic black hole (psychosis) was investigated by viewing the geographical, terrorist, liminal, and psychic spaces through a complex depth psychological lens. </p>

<p>In this dissertation I explore the relationship between spatial organization of domestic practices and their role in the process of community constitution at the local and regional levels during an enigmatic time period on the Iranian Plateau called the Proto-Elamite horizon. This horizon spans from the end of the fourth millennium and the beginning of the third millennium BCE (i.e. 3100-2700 B.C.E.) and marks the beginning of a period of widespread social and political administrative complexity on the Iranian Plateau. For this study, I reviewed the preliminary and published reports of 12 settlements that contain material culture of the Proto-Elamite horizon. I have chosen to investigate the daily practices and patterns of usage of domestic spaces in four of these settlements. I have studied the quality and quantity of macro-remains and artifacts, including architectural features, ceramics and small finds, to infer the types and intensities of daily practices, subsistence patterns and the way indoor and outdoor areas were used in each of these settlements. Then the results are compared in order to examine the similarities and differences among local communities and the possibility of the existence of a larger imagined community in this vast territory during this time period. In this study, I demonstrate that the perceived uniformity of the Proto-Elamite horizon in different settlements is only superficial. Due to the variations in the types and intensities of daily practices and the pattern of presumed domestic space usage, certainly social practices involved in creating and maintaining the Proto-Elamite communities were far from homogenous. The Proto-Elamite horizon as an imagined community functioned more or less as a network with nodes and links that in some cases bypassed certain geographic areas. The Proto-Elamite phenomenon was constituted of local and imagined communities coexisting as nested and/or cross-cutting entities. Shared living conditions in local communities and frequent interactions among their members gave each local community its own character different from the fluid larger imagined community. Ultimately however, local and imagined Proto-Elamite communities were not fully separate and distinct. The Proto-Elamite network was dynamic and did not penetrate every location into the same cultural mould.

<p> This thesis examines the significance of a micro-level approach to the Israeli-Palestinian water conflict. By rethinking scale of analysis and examining local insecurities, Palestinian experiences reveal how water conflict plays out in latent and discursive ways. In a step-by-step method, I detail the processes and outcomes of the water struggle in the West Bank. First, I show how technical challenges ((i) poor water supply, (ii) antiquated water infrastructure, (iii) failed institutions) are shaped by political imperatives. Second, I show how Palestinians have responded to local water sector challenges: (iv) nonpayment to the Palestinian Water Authority for their water supply, (v) increasing rural to urban migration by Palestinian farmers. As a result, Palestinian society is stuck in cycles of crisis that make the conditions increasingly ungovernable. While Palestinians are stuck in a mode of ungovernability, their position in the peace process with Israel is undermined.</p>

<p> This dissertation provides a history from below of Palestinian national movement and Arab society during the tumultuous decade of the 1930s. It argues that the influence and authority of the small group of factionalized and disunited notable politicians that are conventionally understood to have monopolized the leadership of the national struggle during the era of British Mandatory rule has been greatly overstated. This is especially so for the restive and rebellious middle period of the Mandate (1929-1939), during which the movement turned from a conciliatory and quietist strategy of gentlemanly diplomacy preferred by elite politicians to confrontation, mass mobilization and armed struggle, culminating in "the Great Revolt" (1936-1939), a prolonged anti-colonial rebellion against both British rule and the Zionist project it sponsored. By examining the political practices, organizing, self-understanding, and leadership capacities of "youth" and peasants, the dissertation explicates the eclipse of elite preeminence within the national movement and the rise of the new, horizontally-organized social forces that reshaped and radicalized Palestinian politics in the 1930s. </p><p> The dissertation first explores the proliferation of youth associations in the early 1930s and illuminates how the rise of youth as an assertive, ambitious, and politically frustrated element had profound ramifications for the tactics, strategy, and trajectory of the national movement. The narrative then turns to track the decomposition of the Arab rural order from the late Ottoman era to 1936, paying particular attention to the crisis of the countryside under the British, who fecklessly intensified pre-existing tendencies towards peasant destitution, bankruptcy, and dispossession, thereby helping to create a disaffected class of uprooted ex-peasants. The final section analyzes the Great Revolt, focusing on the critical roles of youth, peasants, and workers in initiating and propelling it and on the popular and revolutionary institutions that organized and sustained it against great odds for over three years. This section also interrogates British counterinsurgency, highlighting the role of specific forms of colonial violence, especially collective punishments, in ending the rebellion, and with it the ascent of popular forces within the national movement.</p>

This thesis describes some of the conscious cognitive processes that are inherent in equivalence formation commencing from the transfer of deixis and culminating in the experience of source-to-target and target-to-source indexicality. Its scope is interdisciplinary and the methodology is varied depending on the segment of analysis. It combines a process-oriented analysis with a product based assessment. The stance is also partly subjective because it is based on the personal experience of the translator-researcher of four translating operations. Besides, the structure of the thesis is modular since the main objective is to develop a holistic translation model founded on verbal behaviourism. This approach seeks to put the translator back at the centre of translation theory. All the deictic and indexical aspects of the source-to-target and target-to-source lexico-grammatical, semantico-pragmatic, textual, literary, poetic, discursive, political, ideological and socio-cultural movements are monitored in order to identify the intrinsic cognitive, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic rules which govern the verbal behaviour of the translator. That is why the focus is on the translator’s parole though without any negligence of the influence of langue. As complex linguistic forms, deictic expressions and indexicalities are closely tracked and examined at different phases of the translating process commencing from the lexico-grammatical segment and moving to higher levels of textuality. The deictic projection of the translator-researcher is evaluated during the appropriation and manipulation of the deictic centre of the implied author. The aim is to unravel how the system-common and systemspecific forms preside over the cycle of equivalence formation starting from the source cue, moving to the intermediate draft versions and culminating in an actual target performance. Taking the standpoint of the anthropological linguist, nearformal correspondence is found to depend on intersystemic coincidence as to the similarities and differences between the content of the source form and the equivalent. Relativities of reading, translating and rewriting are identified as the places where the translator essentially exercises her/his creativity and fulfils her/his subjectivity in terms of competence and intuition. Based on decision theory, the verbal behaviour of the translator is defined in terms of the creation of a source-to-target deictic relationship during an indexical reaction to source cues. As equivalence emerges, it sets an interlinguistic precedence. This latter target form often develops into a socially motivated target icon thanks to the overt and covert intersubjective verbal cooperation between the members of a community of practice. The decision-making operation of the individual translator turns into an act of conscious and, sometimes, subconscious verbal reinforcement of established equivalents. It is also based on the elimination of some viable target options which either collapse from the final target performance during the rewriting phase or remain dormant in bilingual lexicographies. The encounter of the translator with different genres also divulges how bilingual competence, poetic attitude, literary prejudice, political affiliation, ideological conviction and sociocultural assumptions shape the mode of the intersubjective, intertextual, interliterary and intercultural dialogue that is eventually held between two universes of discourse. The target re-contextualisation and by implication the decontextualisation of the source ideological grounding are also explained in terms of the aspiration of the translator to adhere to a set of prevailing target linguistic, literary, poetic and socio-cultural norms. Thus target choice, be it informed or instinctive, grows to be a permanently negotiable verbal process among the active subjectivities of any given community of translators.

<p> The ongoing war in Syria is reaching its fourth year, and over 1.5 million people have been forced to leave their homes into surrounding countries. This thesis looks at the Syrian refugees that have traveled to neighboring Jordan, and how religion has kept them stable in diaspora. Looking at Thomas Tweed's theory on translocative religion, I will show how diasporic religion symbolically moves in time and space through the use of sacred artifacts and rituals. Emile Durkheim's lens will reflect why human-made objects are sacred. </p><p> The Muslim Syrian refugees that took part in this research always identified with a vision of what the Syrian nation should be: a nation where religion could be practiced and where sectarianism did not divide the people. Benedict Anderson's "imagined community" makes that nation accessible in the imagination, since the refugees cannot physically be there.</p>

<p> There are countless books, articles and journals written about leadership, whether the discussion centers on traits, characteristics, beliefs, values or the development of said leadership. All in all, the proliferation of information on the subject matter is vast (Northouse, 2013). This is afforded due to the nature of the cultural and political climate of the United States. As a democratic capitalist society, it is afforded the protections of the first amendment therefore, you are able to write about and conjecture on what leadership is. Leadership is cultivated in a variety of ways, through action, education, or as some might argue, through birth. </p><p> Success of Iranian Americans in the US can be attributed to the level of importance that education has for the Iranian community. Iranian Americans hold leadership roles in a variety of fields. Because of their standing when first immigrating to this country, Iranians have added advantages that other immigrant groups do not. It stands to reason that the success of these leaders is based on a variety of factors; it is thought that their success is based on socio-economic and demographic status as well as to their leadership style and decision making approach (Miramontes, 2008). </p><p> Iranian Americans are doing more business in Iran as the opportunities develop due to globalization. To be adequately prepared, an understanding of Iranian American leadership and decision making is needed. A better understanding of Iranian leadership can be developed by looking at the characteristics and assumptions associated with Iranian American leaders. This study focused on successful Iranians in the US and was meant to identify characteristics and assumptions that inform decision-making and leadership practices and how the demographic characteristics correlate. </p><p> Survey responses were used to identify characteristics and assumptions that inform decision&shy;making and leadership practices. The most common decision making preferences were soloist and conductor while the most common leadership styles were coaching and democratic. Most of the correlations (95 of 108 correlations, 88.0%) were not significant at the <i>p</i> &lt; .10 level that compared either the decision making preferences with the demographics or the leadership styles with the demographics.</p>

<p> The diplomatic impasse between the United States and Iran is officially broken after thirty-four years of mutual recriminations and mistrust. The need for a reinvigorated U.S. public diplomacy is essential to forge a new relationship based on respect, understanding, and shared political, social, and economic interests. "Gangnam Style" public diplomacy is a simultaneous multiplatform approach to information sharing and engagement that utilizes various programs to stimulate people-to-people connections based on culture, education, and business. By applying this strategy, the current rapprochement between the United States and Iran can be expanded to the benefit of both countries.</p>