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This dissertation examines the memory of Ras Beirut and the various claims to its exceptionalism. I frame its history as a landscape of memory born of the convergence of narratives of exceptionalism. On the one hand, Ras Beirut's landscape inspired Anglo-American missionary future providence such that they chose it as the site of their college on a hill, the Syrian Protestant College (SPC, later renamed the American University of Beirut [AUB]). On the other hand, the memory of Ras Beirut's "golden age" before the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 inspired longings for a vanished past to Ras Beirut's oldest inhabitants. Shaped by the push of prospect and the pull of recollection, Ras Beirut emerges as a place formed out of the contest of these overlapping articulations of exceptionalism. Moreover, Ras Beirut's narratives have a wider significance and application in their transnational and interconfessional relevance. The missionary New England microcosm of the SPC represented the transnational transposition of memory onto Ras Beirut in an architectural narrative of exceptionalism. The monumental size and scale of their buildings oriented Ras Beirut and realized a "city upon a hill." Drawing from letters written to and from the US, I examine their ambiguous relationship to Ras Beirut that made them both part of the place and apart from the people. At the same time, the local Muslim-Christian community of Ras Beirut argued that Ras Beirut's distinct character rested on their own history of harmonious coexistence. In the early twentieth century, Arab Protestant converts settled in Ras Beirut and became known as the Protestants of Ras Beirut in their affixed identity and collective rootedness to place. This dissertation draws upon archival research and tangible sources in the changing architectural and urban environment. It also relies on oral history and memory to capture the multi-disciplinary making of place that best relates the textured history of Ras Beirut while giving meaning to everyday lived lives. In the process, the connections between the Middle East and the US unfold in transnational terms while the idea of Ras Beirut as a paradigm of coexistence unfolds interconfessional terms.

Throughout the history of the United States, its inhabitants have looked upon their nation as a special place. In some cases, this has exceeded the natural and simple love of home and country and taken a more extreme form. Important to this bent is the tendency to see the nation, its beliefs, and its actions around the world as divinely sanctioned and inspired in some regard. This is a generally necessary component to the idea of American Exceptionalism, which views the United States as a nation with a divinely imposed mission to spread civilization, freedom, and democracy to the ends of the earth. In many ways, the Roman Empire shared these pretentions of being the bearers of civilization to the rest of the world and of being a divinely chosen nation with that vocation. Voices within Christianity, as it developed, provided a potent antithesis to this aspect of Roman imperial ideology, critiquing Roman ideas of their own exceptionalism. By comparing the ideological basis of Roman and American concepts of exceptionalism, this thesis will attempt to apply the critique made by people like Jesus, Paul and Augustine to the United States today.

This thesis aims to determine if there is a discourse of Swedish exceptionalism in the Swedish Government’s Statements of Foreign Policy between 2002 and 2018. Discourse analysis have been used to analyze eight statements, based on a constructivist framework and the theoretical concept of Swedish exceptionalism. Swedish exceptionalism is the idea of Sweden having a self-image of being superior to others, mainly based on the country’s understanding of itself as being a “moral superpower”.   The research question formulated was: Are the Swedish Government’s Statements of Foreign Policy, between 2002 and 2018, articulated through a discourse of Swedish exceptionalism?   To determine if there was a discourse of Swedish exceptionalism in the Statements of Foreign Policy, seven key representations of the concept were established. Those were   Sweden:   1.     being military non-aligned 2.     having an active foreign policy 3.     being pioneering or “leading the way” 4.     bringing security, stability, and peace 5.     being a champion of human rights and democracy 6.     acting as mediator and/or a bridge builder 7.     showing solidarity with “less fortune states” (developing, vulnerable and/or small)   The results of the empirical study were that all key representations were present in all of the statements analyzed, which lead to the conclusion is that the Statements of Foreign Policy between 2002 and 2018 were articulated through a discourse of Swedish exceptionalism.

In 2021, Sweden was ranked as the European country with the highest number of fatal shootings per million inhabitants. As a result, gang violence is described as a national crisis and has turned in to one of the main debate themes among political parties ahead of the parliamentary election in 2022. In the debates on gang violence, it is often linked to migration politics. Swedish Television (SVT) has broadcasted numerous programs on gang violence, and these programs are the main material used in this study.  Drawing on feminist- and critical whiteness theory I examine how ideas of gender, whiteness and Swedishness interplay in the construction of gang violence as a national crisis. By using a retrotopic, a security politic and an affective theoretical perspective it is possible to analyze who is portrayed as vulnerable or problematic in relation to the gang violence. A further ambition of this study is to investigate the connection between folkhem nostalgia and the construction of gang violence as a national crisis. I argue that the Swedish exceptionalism is being used to establish collective feelings of folkhem nostalgia, which contributes to the understanding of gang violence as a national crisis. Based on a thematic analysis (Braun & Clark 2006) I show how feelings of folkhem nostalgia are used to establish narratives of a threatening and problematic Other; a male non-white threat within the nation. Further, the debates and documentaries broadcasted on SVT can be seen as part of political and national interests, where a (hi)story of folkhemmetas a part of the Swedish exceptionalism is being used to establish certain feelings and perceptions related to gender and race. This enables a placement of gang violence in another place, in another culture and in another body.

Scholars have long since identified a quixotic mode in fiction, acknowledging the widespread influence of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605-15) on subsequent texts. In most cases, “quixotic” signifies a preponderance of allusions to Don Quixote in a given text, such that most studies of “quixotic fictions” or “quixotic influence” are primarily taxonomic in purpose and in outcome: they name and catalogue a text or group of texts as “quixotic,” then argue that, by virtue of the vast and protean influence of Don Quixote, the quixotic mode in fiction is always divided, lacking any semblance of ideological consistency. I argue, however, that the very characteristics of Don Quixote that make him such an attractive literary model for such a broad range of narratives—his bookish idealism, his fixation on the upper-classed grandiosity of the lives of noble knights—also form the consistent, ideological groundwork of quixotism: the exceptionalist substitution of fictive idealism for material reality. By tracing the ways in which quixotes become mouthpieces for various exceptionalist arguments in eighteenth-century British and American texts, like Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742), Tobias Smollett's Launcelot Greaves (1760), Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (1792-1815), and Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive (1797), among others, I demonstrate the link between quixotism and exceptionalism, or between fictive idealism and the belief that one (or one's worldview) is an exception to the scrutiny of the surrounding world.

<p>This dissertation compares four programs to create equal employment opportunity on the trans Alaska oil pipeline construction project in order to demonstrate the ruptures and continuities between manpower programs to end poverty and affirmative action to eradicate race and sex discrimination. These four programs posited different subjects and strategies for equal employment opportunity, including a statewide affirmative action plan supporting minority men in the construction industry, federal hiring goals for Alaska Natives, a state "Local Hire" law establishing hiring preference for residents of Alaska, and corporate affirmative action plans for women and minorities. I use archival records and original oral histories with pipeline employees to examine the methods government officials and agencies, corporations, trade unions, social movements, and nongovernmental organizations used to fulfill their visions of equality in employment on the 800-mile long, $8 billion pipeline project. I bridge the gender history of welfare with the history of civil rights in order to show how liberal ideals of economic citizenship in the late 1960s that prioritized creating male workers and breadwinners served as the foundational impetus for equal employment opportunity. I challenge the standard historical narrative of equal employment opportunity in the US, which has attributed affirmative action for women to a logical, if hard won, expansion of positive liberal rights first demanded by the black civil rights struggle, then legislated by the state and implemented by state bureaucrats and corporate personnel. What this narrative does not account for is how the gendered dimensions of liberalism underlying affirmative action for male minorities were able to so abruptly accommodate women as workers and economic citizens by the mid-1970s. I find that, over the course of construction of the pipeline, women in nontraditional jobs on the "Last Frontier" emerged as symbols of the success of equal employment opportunity and the legitimacy of American exceptionalism.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation examines the conventions used to frame and represent sweatshops in and to the U.S. Employing qualitative research methods this dissertation examines U.S. anti-sweatshop discourse, analyzing how the sweatshop and the sweatshop worker are made into exceptional objects of inquiry, and considers what kinds of truths and subjects are garnered from them. This dissertation argues that U.S. anti-sweatshop discourse frames sweatshops as an inherently foreign problem, and that this framing contributes to U.S. exceptionalism and savior ideology. This framing positions U.S. subjects as the primary agents of change whose relation to sweatshops is crucial to their eradication, and renders causal blame upon the racialized poor within the U.S. I argue that this framing undergirds the proliferation of new ethical markets that reproduce dislocation, dispossession, and displacement within U.S. borders via retail gentrification. Ultimately, this dissertation asks what truths are made possible through a mobilizing discourse whose foundational premise is contingent on the imagery of the sweatshop and the sweatshop worker.

The intertwining of political, economic, societal and global changes has resulted in accentuating even more so the 'Muslim question', both domestically and globally. Research has shown that the negative focus Muslims and Islam receive in the West is becoming increasingly mainstreamed, not only through the media, but principally through mainstream political discourse. This mainstreaming is within a global and local narrative of a 'war on terror'. The former followed 9/11 at the outset of this millennium and the latter is represented in the myriad of 'anti-terrorism' initiatives recently augmented in the UK by the Prevent duty. This intensely hostile backdrop has nurtured 'normative truths' about Muslims/Islam. Although Islamophobia did exist long before 9/11, it has now become commonplace and, even, legitimised within the context of tackling terrorism, affecting the experiences of the majority of Muslims in the West and elsewhere in diverse ways. British academia has opened its doors to non-traditional academics, including those from racial and/or ethnic minority backgrounds. Equality policies have been developed, particularly subsequent to the Race Relation Amendment (2000), which has sought to fulfil the recommendations of the Macpherson report (1999). Nevertheless, inequalities do permeate British academia and the experiences of non-traditional academics have been tainted by institutional racism, in both quantity and quality. Statistics attest the former, highlighting the underrepresentation of non-traditional academics in British academia, more particularly in senior leadership and professorial positions. Empirical research findings attest the latter through citing several factors, including career trajectory barriers and the double standards racial bias that operates in a subtle way within higher education institutions (HEIs). These broader and institutional dimensions set the scene for this thesis, the aim of which is to examine the experiences of Muslim academics. The particular experiences of this group of academics have been ignored in previous research, as faith/belief matters have largely been overlooked in studies that explored the experiences of minority academics. This thesis adopts a qualitative approach utilising theoretical bricolage that principally draws on Critical Race Theory (CRT). The notion of race in CRT is, however, expanded to include faith/belief. The thesis also draws on Post-colonial and De-colonial theories, Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus' and Fraser's model of 'status recognition'. It explores the perceptions of Muslim academic participants regarding their own personal/professional identities and how Muslim academics negotiate their Muslim-ness in academia and considers how wider narratives have influenced how they speak about their 'Muslim identity'. The views of the participants are particularly important to examine the extent to which, if any, the 'normative truths' have penetrated academia. This thesis also examines the perceptions of the participants regarding their career experiences and considers whether the experiences of this group of Muslim academics corresponds to, or differs from, the experiences of their fellow non-traditional academics. The Whiteness of the academy was an overarching theme, under which the participants' experiences of racism vis-a-vis job opportunities, career advancement and the multi-faced forms of epistemic racism were discussed. Exceptionalism seemed to be a pre-requisite of gaining a positive experience. Not only did exceptionalism temper perceptions of 'otherness', but being exceptional was an aspect that advanced the career trajectories of some of the participants. Silence was another major theme that recurred in various forms across the fieldwork. These silences appear to have been a consequence of the wider stigmatisation of the Muslim identity, which became evident in the ways some of the participants chose to go about interpreting, or declaring, their Muslim-ness in their workplace. While being Muslim created challenges and required some of the participants to exert substantive negotiations and efforts to fit in, it was advantageous for others, in terms of their career trajectories. Religious micro-aggressions were habitual to the participants with regards to their interactions with staff, and this was particularly acute for females wearing the hijab, where the religious micro-aggressions in HEIs took on a gendered aspect of the 'Muslim problem'. Silence also penetrated the narratives in relation to issues of institutional racism. Networking with other non-white academics was another main theme that featured in the accounts. Muslim academic participants, like other non-traditional academics seek support and mentorship from other minoritised academics to be able to survive in academia. The current study concludes by suggesting that there is a need for more consideration to be given to the aspects of faith/belief in HE policy and practice. This needs to be conducted within a framework that acknowledges the existence of religious microaggressions and the overwhelming normativism of Whiteness in academia.