<p> This dissertation examines indigenous Arab Bedouin legal struggles for land ownership in the Negev area in Israel. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the question of land ownership has been central to relations between Negev Bedouins and the state. The courts have rejected Bedouin claims for land ownership, declaring Negev lands as belonging to the state. </p><p> This study examined the historical Bedouin connection to land in the Negev, with emphasis on the evolution of customary practices of land ownership from the second half of the 19th century until the second half of the 20th century. The validity of Bedouin law in present Bedouin society is considered, as well as the meanings of land for Bedouin land claimants. In addition, clashes between Negev Bedouin law and Israeli law are considered in defining land ownership rights in the Israeli court. </p><p> Located in the discipline of anthropology, the theoretical frames for this study are indigenous people studies and postcolonial theories. The methodologies are participatory research and ethnography. Data sources included interviews with 15 Bedouin land claimants and 3 former Israeli officials, 9 visits to Bedouin villages, observations of 5 academic events regarding the land dispute, and primary documents from various state archives. In addition, a case study was conducted of one litigated land dispute between Bedouin land claimants and Israeli authorities. </p><p> In contrast to the traditional representations of the Bedouins as "rootless nomads," the results of this study indicate a strong connection of Bedouin participants to land in the Negev. The findings suggest that Bedouin society in the Negev includes practices of land ownership, and that their customary land ownership is valid in present Bedouin society. The legal conflict reflects clashes between Israeli legal practices and Bedouin indigenous oral practices, and has also been shaped by the national conflict between Israel as a Jewish state and the Bedouins as part of the Arab Palestinian minority. </p>

<p> The purpose of this grant proposal was to develop a program, identify potential funding sources, and write a grant to fund an Afghan domestic violence program that offers culturally competent services to Afghan women survivors of domestic violence in the San Francisco Bay Area. An extensive literature review was conducted to explore how culture affects perceptions of domestic violence within immigrant communities and the ways in which those perceptions can impede access to domestic violence intervention services. Findings show that while violence against women in Afghan culture is a serious problem, awareness about and services for Afghan women and families in the United States for domestic violence are virtually nonexistent. The proposed program will provide Afghan-specific domestic violence direct services, raise community awareness and train mainstream providers on cultural competency. The actual submission and/or funding of this grant proposal were not requirements for the successful completion of this project.</p>

<p> This dissertation examines the civic experiences of women before, during and after the January 25, 2011 Uprising in Egypt in an attempt to explore this group's perception of what encouraged or discouraged them from engaging civically. Two questions guide this investigation. How do Egyptian women with a social studies background narrate their civic experiences before, during and after the January 25 Uprising? And to what extent have the K-12 citizenship education and related policies impacted the civic engagement of these future teachers before, during and after the Uprising? </p><p> Inspired by the works of Dewey, Freire and hook, this study views education as key in developing engaged citizens. Schools represent the society and are responsible for cultivating future generations. The experiences students have influences their knowledge and attitudes as citizens. This study traces the impact of education, school environment, and the society in general on empowering women to have a voice, engage in the community, and make political choices. </p><p> Data were collected in Egypt in 2013 amid much instability but at a time when Egyptians had to put their civic duty first and make many political choices. Twenty-two women took part in face-to-face semi-structured interviews. The participant pool included teachers of social studies, graduate students of social studies education or history, and undergraduate students majoring in a social studies related field. Additional sources of data included, non-participant observations, document analysis, and field notes. </p><p> Using grounded theory to analyze and interpret the data; findings reveal that societal norms and school practices have limited the participants' choices and led the women to believe that their voices were silenced. However, the data also reflects strong human agency that the women exhibited consciously and unconsciously. Through intensive fieldwork, this dissertation sets the groundwork for future studies targeting education and women in the Middle East. It offers intellectual space for a much-needed conversation on educational policies, citizenship education, democracy, and women status in the Middle East.</p>

<p> This thesis presents a description of the system of pronominal clitics in the Logar dialect of Ormuri, an Iranian language of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Logar dialect is based in the Logar province of Afghanistan and is near to extinction. The thesis studies grammatical constraints on the occurrence of pronominal clitics in Ormuri sentences. It also investigates discourse factors that influence when a pronominal clitic is used to refer to an entity in the situation that is being talked about, rather than a noun, an independent pronoun, or zero anaphora. My analysis is based on a corpus consisting of fifty-five narrative texts told by Ormuri men and women in Afghanistan in the 1970s, collected and compiled separately by V. A. Efimov and Charles Kieffer. Each text was analysed with special attention to where, when, and how the pronominal clitics were used. Participant reference was analysed using the Default/Marked method described in Dooley and Levinsohn (2001).</p><p> Within a clause, Ormuri pronominal clitics may function as subject, object, possessor, or indirect object. A clitic functioning as possessor appears immediately after the possessed constituent. When functioning as subject, object, or indirect object, pronominal clitics are generally placed immediately after the first phrasal constituent of the clause. In some cases, a clitic may be co-referential with a sentence-initial noun phrase that functions as a subject or object argument. When, in this way, a pronominal clitic "doubles" a noun phrase occurring earlier in the clause, the clitic appears after the second, rather than the first, phrasal constituent of the sentence.</p><p> In present-tense clauses, an object argument can be encoded as a pronominal clitic, but a subject argument cannot be. In past-tense clauses, on the other hand, the subject argument of a transitive verb can be encoded as a pronominal clitic, but its object cannot be. This asymmetrical distribution of pronominal clitics in past- and present-tense clauses is a remnant of a more elaborate tense-based split-ergative system that must have existed in the past, and which still exists in the Kaniguram dialect in Pakistan.</p><p> Regarding the question as to when pronominal clitics (rather than nouns or other encodings) are selected to refer to participants in the discourse world, it was found that clitics are strongly preferred in contexts where they encode a reference to a participant that continues in the same grammatical role that it had in the previous clause or sentence.</p><p> The system of pronominal clitics in Logar Ormuri is similar to, albeit not identical to, the systems found in related languages, including Parachi, Persian, and Pashto.</p>

Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2002. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [152]-169).

Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2002. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [152]-169).

<p> My dissertation studies the uses of the notion of archive in post-war contemporary art practices around the Lebanese Civil Wars (1975-1990). After the wars, a group of artists from Lebanon began to collect data and produce documents that referenced the traces and memories of the conflict. These compilations metamorphosed into aesthetic projects that took archival-like forms. In this dissertation, I discuss the archival works of Walid Raad, Paola Yacoub/Michel Lasserre, Gilbert Hage, Jalal Toufic, Joanna Hadjithomas/Khalil Joreige, Lamia Joreige, Akram Zaatari, Rasha Salti/Ziad Antar and Marwan Rechmaoui. </p><p> This boom of art practices around memory and archives in Lebanon has opposed the politics of amnesia sponsored by the Lebanese state through the Amnesty Law of 1991. Post-war artists, however, have addressed this official amnesia not by seeking to reconstruct the historical facts and recover the real documentation of the wars; instead, they have activated the memories of the wars by exploring the very destruction of these memories. These artists have produced and at the same time deconstructed archives by assembling fragmented, fabricated, para-fictional, and decontextualized collections of photographs, videos, and everyday materials. I describe these practices as <i>ar(t)chive production</i> (or <i>archives-in-the-making</i>). </p><p> While the notion of archive is common in modern and contemporary art regarding trauma and memory, my hypothesis is that the archival works of these Lebanese artists are shaped by the new structural context of global war. Most European models of archive pursue a recovery of memory against the destruction in the total wars of the twentieth century, particularly exemplified by the artworks about the Holocaust. By contrast, the practices on the Lebanese Civil Wars engage in the logic of constructive destruction of what Carlo Galli has theorized as global war. Within this logic, violence is both destructive and productive. In this respect, instead of opposing the official amnesia by reviving the memories of the wars, the post-war Lebanese artists reflect on amnesia by showing the construction of the past by means of its own destruction.</p><p>

<p> In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the need for distance-learning programs in the universities has been gaining importance. Najran, the area in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which this study addressed, has been the target of serious attacks against both the government and the civilian population in a recent conflict with Yemen. Because all areas of Najran have been targeted, including educational institutions, the ability for students to attend the university in recent years has been severely curtailed. While conflict prompted the study, there were, and are, other reasons for promoting distance learning in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The evidence gathered in this study exhibited the value of distance learning overall. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia could benefit greatly from distance learning programs in Najran and elsewhere due to limited space for classes, the need to shift away from the dependence on an oil economy, and the need to address both cultural and geographical factors such as providing an education to students in more rural locations, female students, and students unable to attend traditional classes due to the rapid growth of the student population. The research questions asked in the study addressed reshaping education in the war-stricken area of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia-Yemen border areas; the perceptions of teachers, students, and hiring authorities at the Civil Service Ministry of the affordances and constraints of distance learning; and the perception of the value of distance learning. A qualitative case-study methodology framed by the epistemology of constructivism was used. The study was carried out by conducting focus group interviews with teachers and students as well as with hiring authorities at the Civil Service Ministry. Three different data collection tools were used (focus group interviews, a research journal, and the gathering of artifacts). All three provided information regarding distance learning at the University of Najran and in the hiring of distance learning graduates in the City of Najran. The findings revealed the need for access, basic infrastructure, and interest in distance learning. To allow for the continued enhancement of technology, shifts in perception and greater collaboration to promote online education and employment of distance learning graduates in Najran, changes must take place.</p><p>

Abstract not available.

This study addresses the translatability of emotive expressions in the poetry of the distinguished Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. The study gives translators and readers an example of how to look at emotiveness in the Arabic poetry by studying main sources of emotiveness like cultural expressions, figures of speech such as rhetorical questions and repetitions as well as expressions of direct emotiveness such as proper names. The ambition of this study is to enrich the literature on translation with new examples of emotiveness by pointing out the expected problem areas when translating emotive expressions. Furthermore, this study is significant since it attempts to answer the question of whether emotiveness constitutes a problem when translating from Arabic into English and whether the meaning and the musicality of poetry are translatable or not. The English translations are selected from: 1. Unfortunately, It Was Paradise translated and edited by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein (2003) e 2. The Butterfly's Burden translated by Fady Joudah (2007). The original poems can be found in Darwish's most recent poetry collections included in the 2009 edition of The Complete Recent Works by Mahmoud Darwish, published in Beirut. The emotive expressions selected from the English collections and compared to the Arabic original are divided into three categories: the cultural expressions, the linguisticexpressions, and the political expressions. The study highlights different emotive devices used in the selection of poems, by carrying out an analysis of the English translation as well as the Arabic original text. The emotive expressions selected are carefully analyzed to show how the translation was able to render the emotive meaning expressed and intended by the poet in the text in its original form.