From the revelation of the extent of the Iranian nuclear program in 2002 through the end of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s first term in 2009, the interplay between international and domestic actions came to define the progression of the nuclear program. This thesis delves into these into these interactions, examining the failures and successes of Iran’s relationships with various international entities to determine how external factors affected the evolution of Iran’s nuclear program. This thesis draws upon a scientific knowledge of nuclear technology, a theoretical view of international relations, and a historical and cultural understanding of the Arab World to analyze the political and scientific ramifications of Iran’s nuclear program and directly link international actions and domestic reactions to explain the program’s progression. This clear connection elucidates the key failings of negotiations during this era: an inability of one side to understand the other.

<p> The present study was designed to measure differences in elementary school teachers' attitudes toward willingness to teach students with ADHD in their classrooms in Riyadh City in Saudi Arabia through a descriptive non-experimental quantitative research instrument. The study examined relationships among many variables through teachers' level of education, years of teaching experience in the education area, grade level of teaching, class size, previous teaching experience with any kind of disabilities, teachers' positions in schools, special education courses taken in college, teachers' in-service training, and teachers' gender. The last variable examined teachers' overall attitudes toward their willingness to teach students with ADHD in their classrooms. </p><p> The participants in the study, a total of 300 elementary school teachers including 150 males and 150 females, completed the survey. Overall the results found that elementary school teachers have neutral attitudes toward willingness to teach students with ADHD in their classrooms. Moreover, the findings of the study revealed the significance of the relationship between teachers' willingness to teach students with ADHD in their classrooms and their level of education, grade level of teaching, class size, previous teaching experience with any kind of disabilities, positions in schools, special education courses taken in college, and in-service training. Finally, the study found there was no relationship among years of teaching experience in the education area or gender and teachers' attitudes toward willingness to teach students with ADHD in their classrooms.</p>

<p> High fertility rates may not pose short-term threats to Pakistan's stability however, Pakistan's long-term survival largely depends on reducing the rate at which the population is expanding because this growth is outstripping economic development. This paper seeks to highlight a viable strategy for Pakistan to improve its population planning approach. The Iranian government's experience with population reduction from 1986-2010 will form the basis of comparison in this paper, helping to identify a way forward for Pakistan. The first section introduces the current population growth in Pakistan and the economic and security risks associated with these high fertility rates. This section also explains the similarities between Pakistan and Iran and why Iran's population programs could be paired with elements of population programs being initiated by the Pakistani government. The second section examines family planning promotion in both Iran and Pakistan. Iran's unique strategy in introducing family planning to a nation of conservative Muslims involved several unique approaches. In Pakistan, these same approaches, if implemented, could bolster Pakistani receptiveness of family planning. The third part reviews ways Pakistan could improve their family planning education model. In Iran, family planning education promoted birth spacing as way to reduce the religious stigma that might forbid contraception. Iran's government also undertook a serious effort to educate men, young adults and couples through family planning education workshops. The final reviews the role that female empowerment, literacy and employment have in reducing nationwide fertility in both Pakistan and Iran. The Iranian government elevated of the status of women by integrating them into civil society. This social change reduced nationwide fertility and overall lifetime fertility. In Pakistan, female education has indirectly reduced fertility rates but has not been promoted by the government to the same degree as in Iran.</p>

abstract: This thesis examines the advent of the Egyptian women's movement from the late nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century. Continuous negotiations for control between the secular and the religious institutions of Egypt led to the state's domination over the public jurisdiction and the Islamists maintaining a grip over the Egyptian private sphere, which includes family laws and matters of the home. The Egyptian women's movement contested and resisted against the secular nationalists (the state) and conservative Islamists for just and equal society in general, and political rights, and educational, marriage, and divorce reform specifically, which were assurances made to the women's movement by both. Groups formed within the movement joined together and converged to collaborate on key concerns that involved Egyptian women as a collective group such as education and political rights. Using the written works of scholars and leaders of these movements, this study investigates and observes the unique unity achieved through the diversity and disunity of the Egyptian women's movement; as well as explores the individual activism of significant leaders and pioneers of the movement in the midst of cultural encounters resulting from imperialism, political revolutions, and other major societal and political developments of nineteenth and twentieth century Egypt. It explores the ideas and actions of the Egyptian women as they emerged from a veil of silence which shadowed women's existence in Egypt's crucial years of nationalization eventually leading to a unique emergence of an incorporation of Islamism and feminism. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. History 2011

<p> In the Middle East and in many majority Muslim nations, homosexuality, including homosexual acts, identities, desires, and discussions of those, is considered taboo. Utilizing a feminist theoretical orientation, this project examined the ways in which same-sex desiring women in Amman, Jordan view the concept of sexually desiring and its relationship to identities. It also examined the pressures placed on them to abide by and navigate familial and religious expectations that conflict with their sexuality. This project drew upon 15 interviews from Muslim and Christian women in Amman using semi-structured and unstructured interviews and participant observation. After analysis, it was concluded that the majority of informants believe in innate sexual desires and sexuality and that all people sexually desire in similar ways. It was also concluded that informants face more pressure from family than from religion, and therefore, find it easier to balance religious obligations than familial obligations with their sexuality.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation assembles a case study of Iranian immigrant families in the United States conducted in the northeast. This work addresses the transnational diasporic global identity of second-generation Iranian-Americans. The literature reflects on the exile experience, concluding that Iranian identity is a disputed problematic issue. I argue hybridity pens the migratory process, building links and relationships at the material and cultural levels from the sending and receiving countries. To reveal these connections, I use the funds of knowledge/identity approach to demonstrate how families reach self-understanding and communicate that understanding to others. By examining Persian culture and traditions, this approach sheds new light on the cultural transformations and cultural preservations valued among the second generation. The study shows that complex webs of factors continue to be at work in the shaping of the sociocultural dynamics of Iranian-Americas.</p><p>

abstract: This thesis focuses on justice, human rights, and migration in Iraq. It explores the ideas of justice and human rights, and how they influence the migration of the Iraqi Assyrians and Chaldeans. Through the use of qualitative methodology, including a review of scholarly literature, personal experience, and semi-formal interviews with ten individuals, this research mainly focuses on the influence that justice and human rights had on migration during the U.S.-Iraq War, from 2003 until 2011. Justice, human rights, and migration before and after the War are examined. The study concludes that justice and human rights are factors that influence the migration of Iraq's Assyrian and Chaldean community throughout the U.S.-Iraq War; however justice and human rights are not the only factors. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Justice Studies 2014

Place marketing has become one of the most popular methods used by urban elites and civic boosters to revitalize and re-image cities in order to project a world-class city image. However, case studies examined in the literature have primarily focused upon Western cities and thus conclusions with respect to place marketing's mechanisms and effects are limited. This thesis seeks to broaden the application of place marketing as a concept by using Astana, Kazakhstan as a case study. The thesis focuses upon evaluating place marketing as a concept to determine whether the construction and projection of a world-class city image of place through spectacular developments and entertainment facilities is truly a global practice. The research indicates that Astana is following the place marketing model seen in case studies of Western cities, especially with respect to the construction and projection of a world-class city image.

<p> This dissertation investigates the coterminous emergence of imperial documentary operations and modernization programs in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. It argues that the period saw a governing investment in documentary format and documentary "value," and that this was a response to the containment strategy of cultural diplomacy at the onset of the Cold War. It's focus is a mixed group of governmental and non-governmental entities. The project makes evident how a group of events and practices involved in foreign diplomacy campaigns of knowledge/intelligence and large scale overseas modernization programs give rise to a discourse of documentary diplomacy. The output of these projects was varied: locally-made rural training films; newsmagazine newsreel; travelogues, and the exported nontheatrical American documentaries. As the dissertation demonstrates, they were influenced by a weaponized ethnographic documentary experience, first formulated in Asia by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in the late 1930s. The subsequent rise of governing investment in culture for imperial planning during the 1940s, large scale government experiment with training films during World War II, and governing investment in grassroots audiovisual movement of educational film in the United States all bear the marks of these knowledge/intelligence campaigns. The path to freedom, accordingly, became a bifurcating atomized process that ultimately reconceptualized geopolitically sensitive nation-states as people, as audiences, and eventually as individuals available to be freed from their own "hostile" and "uncooperative" governments on their way toward building bottom-up democratic movements. </p><p> Containment campaigns of defending American capitalism against Soviet communism in postcolonial nation-states led to a proliferation of instructional films throughout the world. These missions invested in local filmmaking and established pockets of documentary infrastructure that inevitably played some roles in the making and transformation of national cinemas. As a case study of the emerging discourse of documentary diplomacy, this dissertation also investigates American documentary operations in Iran during the 1940s and 1950s and demonstrates how US-Iranian media projects institutionalized documentary, audiovisual modernization, and media governance in Iran. The Syracuse documentary mission to Iran emerged as among the most important sites of such campaigns. For instance, the first generation of localizing newsmagazine series were made in Iran for Iranians by Iranian crew, using American planning, infrastructure and capital. With this convenient "usage," however, also came subscribing to an ideological package. Media producers and advisors from thirty-five American universities, under Syracuse University's binational contract with American and Iranian governments, participated in this work by 1959. </p><p> As this research project demonstrates, documentary diplomacy in this era brings into contact and coherence film and legal discourse, diplomatic policymaking, film practice, and applied social scientific research and intelligence production. In this respect, documentary diplomacy encompasses a set of events that include making documentary, mobile screening, expert viewing, national character research, applied anthropology intelligence work, survey trips, public opinion projects, courses of audiovisual and documentary training, and nation-building projects of central documentary infrastructure and media governance. </p><p> This dissertation argues that localized missions of overseas audiovisual training and documentary filmmaking and infrastructure during the 1950s operate through a propaganda facade of apolitical modernization by building on the governing strategy of welfare imperialism via invitation. In some cases, this went to extent of sponsoring anti-leftist localized newsreel campaigns of crushing local journalism and a wide range of objectifying practices. The village how-to films enforced a rapid modernization campaign while audiovisual training facilitated central education and governing. The dissertation also argues that the apolitical facade of the imperial documentary campaign in Iran is an expression of claiming fakery and manipulation in the name of the real. </p><p> The project draws from a wealth of declassified archival sources in the United States National Archives at College Park, the Library of Congress, the Archives of Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and other sources including individual memoirs and interviews. The archival sources include memoranda of film scripts, film receipts, correspondence, embassy notes, university and government contract, cultural manuals, immigrant interviews and a documentary bible of administrative film theory and production. </p><p> Following the case study of Iran, the dissertation extrapolates that researching the genealogical course of postwar imperial campaigns of documentary diplomacy in the Middle East and Asia can contribute to understanding of the transformation of modernization programs of central education, media cultures and media governance.</p><p>

<p> This study employs a mixed method, sequential explanatory design strategy, one in which the interpretation of the quantitative data is weighted more heavily than that of the qualitative data, to record social media usage among Assyrian Christian Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) who were held in the Asti 2 IDP camp in Ankawa, Iraq, from 2014 to 2017. Through a quantitative survey instrument and a series of oral interviews, this study explores the social media habits of 315 respondents, paying particular attention to types of social media applications used, attitudes of the IDPs towards the useful of SMA in making the world aware of their plight and resolving their displacement. </p><p>