This research explores Palestinian refugee women’s political rights through a broader examination of the gender dynamics in one refugee camp in Lebanon. Using two focus groups and individual interviews with 20 women, the research highlights the patriarchal and colonial structures that dominate the women’s lives, preventing them not only from engaging in political activities, but also hindering their opportunities for work and socialization outside their immediate familial spheres. The political disillusionment within the researched and broader Palestinian community, as a result of the encroaching project of Empire as defined by Hardt and Negri, has created a divided Palestinian cause, a failed youth, and a society attempting to hold on to its identity. However, along with that comes the oppression of a sub-section of that society – the women; the remaining possession that the men have. Women who previously engaged in armed resistance have not advanced politically, socially, or economically – and in fact the history of their struggles are being erased as surely as their land is. Nonetheless, pockets of resistance – a Multitude – of women, agents in their own fates, are fighting the current towards a more emancipatory future for themselves and future Palestinian men and women.

This thesis points to the existence of a bourgeois revolution in the history of the Ottoman Empire. Against all approaches of the historiography on the subject which employ outmoded criteria and point to a duality between the moments in 1908 and 1923 / it employs contemporary arguments on bourgeois revolutions and argues that the Ottoman Empire witnessed a single revolutionary sequence which occurred between July 1908 and November 1922. The thesis also suggests the idea that this single revolutionary sequence of the Ottoman Empire was a bourgeois revolution.

En esta tesis analizaré en la poesía de Georgina Herrera, Nancy Morejón y Excilia Saldaña 1 los conceptos de género y raza y cómo han sido apropiados del esquema patriarcal y redefinidos en la elaboración de identidad y nación a través de lo que Flora González Mandri y Catherine Davies han llamado la memoria cultural. Mi propósito es demostrar como dichas poetas han subvertido, a través de la palabra, un discurso historicamente maniqueísta que ha servido para reafirmar la doble subyugación de raza y género, como también exploro los resortes de auto-inscripción y el imaginario mítico-cultural que cada poeta emplea en su poesía para desmantelar el paradigma patriarcal. Lejos de ofrecer un análisis exhaustivo de la obra de cada escritora, mi objetivo es más bien deslindar las complejidades culturales que enmarca la producción literaria de cada una. He tomando en cuenta el contexto sociohistórico de donde surgen para comprender el lugar que han reclamado en la producción y reproducción cultural. Aunque no abordo los discursos de raza y género mediante un filtro estrictamente teórico, más bien utilizo ciertas teorías como ópticas en el vislumbrar poético de la aportación de cada poeta, me he apoyado cuando necesario en algunos postulados feministas, postestructuralistas, y postcoloniales. No obstante mi intención es ante todo ofrecer una lectura que se fundamenta en el análisis literario. En ciertos poemas aplico algunos aspectos de la teoría feminista de bell hooks, la contrapropuesta que ofrece Oyèrónké Oy ĕwùmi ante el discurso feminista occidental, el planteamiento sobre el poder del lenguaje y la dominación del discurso de Michel Foucault, y la teoría postcolonial de Homi Bhaba sobre el tercer espacio y la mímica. Herrera, Morejón, y Saldaña se adueñan de sus historias y reivindican las de sus ancestros femeninos mediante el protagonismo que ejercen como creadora/sujetos. Utilizando los temas de la memoria, la reconstrucción de la identidad, el homenaje a los antepasados femeninos, la recreación del vínculo con África como matriz, el rescate de la imagen de la mujer en el proyecto de identidad nacional, y la exaltación de la maternidad, dichas poetas deconstruyen los estereotipos afro-femeninos para después reconstruir y proyectar la imagen de la mujer dentro de un marco de resistencia. En su afán de desmontar los códigos establecidos, desarticulando y reconstruyendo el pasado para redefinir la identidad de la mujer afrocubana de manera protagónica en el presente, la obra de Morejón, Herrrera, y Saldaña rompe y transciende los parametros vanguardistas del negrismo 2 misógino de la primera mitad del siglo XX. Tras su auto-inscripción dentro de la poesía, la mujer afrocubana se plantea como creadora y portadora de la palabra constructora. En su lucha por crear un sujeto lírico que la represente y quede impreso en el subconsciente imaginario cultural, emerge como la voz más influyente de la poesía cubana post-revolucionaria.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico lost power in 2000 after controlling the governing structure for 71 years. With the old rules gone forever, the PRI needed to regroup in order to survive as a viable party. This thesis explores how the PRI went about transforming its candidate selection procedures from 2000 to 2006 in order to remain a viable political party. Since the president of Mexico made most candidate selection decisions previously, the party had no choice but to reform its procedures. What emerged was a battle for power and influence between and among the party leaders at the national level and party affiliated state governors. Those state governors sought to dominate party structures within their states as the President of the Republic once dominated the party nationally. To restore the legitimacy many in the party thought it lost, the PRI first experimented with open primaries. It eventually concluded that open primaries caused divisions, thus often hurting the party electorally. As time passed, the PRI moved away from selecting candidates through open primaries and sought to nominate unity candidates. / text

This paper examines the relationship between Fulgencio Batista and the Communist Party of Cuba. At odds during the first several years of Batista's rule, when strikes and repression were the topics of the day, the two sides eventually saw in each other a means to an end. In efforts to understand the Cuban Revolution of the late 1950's, historians often portray Batista as a dictatorial puppet of American business and policy. Contrary to this image, in his first regime (1934 until 1944), Batista presided over the creation of a nominal constitutional democracy. To do this he needed the support and good conduct of organized labor, in which the Communists could be a powerful force. In 1935 the Communist Party International, based in Moscow, adopted a shift in tactics. So as to combat fascism, the Party turned away from its traditionally isolationist line. It sought to make alliances with like-minded groups and wanted to serve in the government. In mid-1938 an agreement was reached between Batista and Party heads from which sprang a mutually beneficial alliance lasting through the first batistato. The relationship is often overlooked in Cuban historiography and many questions remain.To truly understand its significance we need more information as to origins, conditions, and consequences of the agreements. This paper explores the conditions on both sides, seeking to understand how and why the unlikely bedfellows came together. As well, it traces the relationship until the end of Batista's term in 1944, focusing on the ebb and flow of support concerning major issues of the day, such as organized labor, the constitutional assembly, the election of 1940, and involvement in World War II. Finally, this study shows how the alliance with the Communist Party is a necessary point in a full understanding of Fulgencio Batista and the era.

Though the American Revolutionary Army is often portrayed as a crucible of national feeling, this study of 169 diaries reveals that Revolutionary soldiers barely understood, or accepted as part of their community, large parts of the country for which they fought. The diaries include journals of ordinary soldiers, officers, and camp followers, and demonstrate the largely overlooked significance of soldiers’ physical environment in shaping their world-view. Typically episodic, often filled with random and apparently mundane detail, and occasionally dark with deep sadness and melancholy, diary writings reveal soldiers’ definitions of who belonged to the national community. Military historians of the Revolutionary War have long culled important details from various diaries, with the goal of constructing a synthesis of relevant narratives into a single history. In many ways, this project does the opposite. Instead of fitting soldier diarists into a single linear narrative of the war, it looks at how soldiers fought their war and understood its landscapes by creating a variety of sometimes complimentary, sometimes conflicting, personal and group narratives. The purposes and conventions that defined soldiers’ descriptions of land, architecture and people they encountered reveal their motivations for fighting, definitions of just violence, and hopes for victory. In turn each of these factors shaped their understanding of their war and the community for which they fought. This thesis follows American soldiers’ problem of understanding their new country through three chronological phases of the war. In the early years of the war, as American strategy focused on cities, soldiers struggled to protect themselves against the perceived immorality of city life. By blaming cities for their losses, soldiers developed a dark set of justifications for destroying civilian landscapes. In the mid war, the use of landscape description as a weapon intensified as both armies increasingly turned to scorched earth policies. As the campaigning turned south late in the war, northern soldiers guarded themselves against a landscape they perceived as inherently unhealthy. In their depiction of these places, soldiers used their diaries as tools to protect their bodies and souls, and contemplate American landscapes they often found foreign. / History

As a conjunctural construct located between politics, society and art, the popular-democratic construes the resistance literature of the 1970s and 1980s as being expressive of an entire social movement to end oppression and transform society. Through the construct of the popular-democratic voices that have been marginalised, fragmented, dislocated, excluded or otherwise silenced can be seen in relation to each other and to the sources of oppression. The introductory chapter addresses the characteristics of the popular-democratic, and the caveats and challenges that attend it. The remaining nine chapters are divided into three sections of three chapters each. The first section examines repression of different types: structural repression, coercive repression/state violence and cultural repression. An important index of the structural oppression of apartheid is the home, which a range of resistance writers addressed in depth when they dealt with city life and the townships, forced removals, homeless people, rural struggles, migrants and hostels, commuting, the "homelands" and exile. The coercive apparatus of the state, the security forces, were used against dissidents in the neighbouring states and within the country. The literature addresses the effects of the cross border raids, assassinations, abductions and bombings. The literature that deals with internal repression examines the effects of the mass detentions, restrictions, listings and bannings as well as the impact of the states of emergency, P.W. Botha's "total strategy", and the actions of the death squads. An examination of the conservative liberal constructions of resistance literature helps to clarify why resistance literature remains inadequately conceptualised ("Soweto poets", "protest literature") although there has been a vibrant and challenging corpus. The way in which the audience of resistance literature is constructed is identified as a key problem. The responses of various resistance writers, in poems, interviews, letters and articles, to conservative liberal prescriptions are contextualised. The middle section of the argument focuses on the organisations that developed to challenge oppression. Through an examination of the literature that was influenced by the activism and the cultural and philosophical production of Black Consciousness, it is apparent that the movement was continuous with the rest of the struggle for liberation. The satirical poems that challenged both the state and the conservative liberals offer powerful displays of verbal wit. The struggles of workers are addressed through texts that deal with their plight and call for worker organisations. The trade union COSA TV paid close attention to the development of worker culture, which proved to be critical when the state cracked down on the resistance organisations. The production values and effects of very different plays about strikes, The Long March and Township Fever receive particular attention. The rise of the United Democratic Front (UDF) is anticipated in literature that celebrates the potential of ordinary South Africans to achieve political significance through unity. Constructed out of substantial ideological pluralism, the UDF arose as an act of political imagination and organisational strategy. The ideological convergence between the UDF and COSATU on the question of bidding for state power constituted a turning-point in a nation built on the intolerance of difference. The last section focuses more closely on the productive responses of the culture of resistance to specific aspects of repression, such as the censorship of the media and the arts, the killings of activists, the struggles around education and the keeping of historical records (which enable an interrogation and reconstruction of discursive and interpretive authority). / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Durban-Westville, 1998.

Användning av datorer och Informations- och kommunikationsteknologier (IKT) har förändrat människors sätt att kommunicera och utbyta information i många områden. Utbildningssektor är en av sektorer där IKT spelar en stor roll. Under de senaste åren införde utbildningssektorn många nya teknologier för att stödja undervisnings- och inlärningsmetoder. Synen på undervisning och lärande förändrades radikalt med hjälp av IKT. Tidigare forskning påpekar att IKT utvecklar studerandes olika förmågor, bland annat inlärning ökas. Det har noterats ökning av behandling och hantering av stor mängd information, intellektuell tillväxt. Den också hjälper studerande att uppnå bättre studieresultat och prestera bättre i en del av ämnen. Detta arbete undersöker bland annat vilka möjligheter finns med IKT i undervisningen, varför man ska satsa på IKT i skolor, samt som IKT- påverkan på utbildningen och lärande. IKT suddar ut tidigare gränser och idag finns möjligheter att göra saker som förut var inte möjlighet att göra. Exempel på detta är flexibla arbets- och studietider, distansstudier och et cetera. Både lärare och studerande blir involverade i sitt arbete/ studier även på fritiden. Min studie fann också att IKT förbättrar och underlättar sätt att undervisa. Inlärningen förbättras hos många studerande. IKT med dessa portabla tekniker gör vardagen mycket flexibelt. Mina intervjuer påvisar att flexibilitet är bra, fast det finns en del risker med IKT i undervisningen, bland annat plagiering ökas, samt som ytinlärning kan ökas. Informationssökning har blivit enklare med hjälp av IKT, fast mindre än hälften av alla tillfrågade i min studie tvivlar på detta. Tidslöseri är också vanligt förekommande problem i skolan och ibland beror detta på att studerande inte kan använda teknik. Min studie visar att det är viktigt att myndigheter satsar på utbildning och vägledning vid användning av teknik, samt som vägledning vid informationssökning. För att bibehålla konkurrenskraft på internationell nivå satsning på IKT i skolorna fortsätter. I min studie lärare och studerande anser att satsning på IKT är mycket viktig, eftersom den hjälper att skaffa IT- kunnig arbetskraft, samt som den gör skolan mera flexibel och höjer kvaliteten på lärande. / The usage of computers and Information and Communication technologies (ICT) has changed the way people communicate and share information in many areas, and education is the one of the sectors where ICT plays a major role. Over the past few years educational sector introduced many new technologies to support teaching and learning methods. To maintain competitiveness at international level, the investment in ICT in schools has grown constantly. Due to the growing influence of ICT on educational sector the view of people has changed drastically on teaching and learning. Previous research points out that ICT develop students’ different abilities, such as increased learning, abilities to process and handle huge amount of data, as well as intellectual growth. It is also helps students to achieve better academic results by performing better in some of the academic courses. ICT also erases previous limits and allows doing things that were not possible to do before. Some of the examples are flexibility in work and studies, distance learning. According to my study many teachers and students, believe that the investment in ICT is very important because it helps to increase the number of IT- skilled citizens as well as makes school more flexible thus, improves the quality of learning. This work investigates also the possibilities that can be explored with ICT in education, such as importance of investment in ICT in schools, importance of ICT in education and learning in general. My study has shown that, both teachers and students sometimes will be involved in their work and studies even at leisure time. My study has found that ICT improves and facilitates the ways of teaching and learning, as well as learning improves. ICT with these portable technologies make students life more flexible. My interviews indicate that flexibility is good, though there are some risks or disadvantages with ICT in education, including increased plagiarism, as well as superficial learning may be increased. Information search with help of ICT has become easier, according to earlier research, though less than half of all respondents in my study doubt this. The study demonstrates that it is important to invest in education and guidance of information search. Wastage of time is also common problem in school and sometimes this happens because students are not able to use the technology efficiently.

This paper presents a narrative history of Iranian revolutionary ideology and its evolving impact on foreign policy. It looks at this history primary through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an institution established after the revolution and designed to defend the Islamic political order in Iran as well as oppressed Muslims abroad. The Revolutionary Guard, or Guard for short, became a focal point in the efforts of Iranian revolutionaries to export their ideology and has evolved overtime into a politicized and unconventional military force, often associated in the media with supporting foreign terrorists and militants. This paper argues that the Guard has implemented revolutionary ideology in an arc from radical to pragmatic. Unlike past literature on the Guard, this paper situates the organization’s institutional history in Iran’s broader political context and concentrates on its relationships to and differences with other factions. A persistent aim is also to analyze terminology such as radical and pragmatic and provide theoretical foundations for the use of such terms.

Zugl.: Bremen, Univ., Diss., 2005