This is an ethnographic study of virginity in the context of virginity examinations in Turkey. It is a discourse-centered ethnography that focuses on the rhetorical uses of language. Its method of inquiry is a qualitative research methodology known as participatory action resear…
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In this dissertation, I investigate how the growing market for "ethnic art" is linked to the pursuit of modern and cosmopolitan identities among producers, distributors and consumers. Based on field research in Bali, Indonesia and in California, Georgia and North Carolina, I exa…
This diary is an outcome of the recurring bewilderment I have had with the strange relationship knowledge has with the desire to know. It is this relationship that I have taken upon myself and explored, in ways that are oblique, tangential, as well as more direct. The context of…
This dissertation is a history of Egyptian filmmaking since its beginnings before the interwar period in 1907 to 1977. It explores the emergence of Egyptian middle-class national identity, first during the interwar period, and its achievement of a broad cultural hegemony by the …
This dissertation studies the political culture of the ruling family in Ottoman Tunisia from roughly 1770 to 1840. It re-imagines an era that nationalist and colonialist perspectives have insisted on labeling the "pre-colonial," by emphasizing Tunisia's position in the Ottoman E…
A determination to nurture a developing cultural modernity in early twentieth century Kuwait provoked subsequent symbolic explorations in architecture and urban form. Socioeconomic and political conditions enabled the state to undertake utopian projects that, for the most part, …
This phenomenological study tackles the question of the nature and dynamics of a shift in worldview that may occur on multiple levels after an Arab American cross-cultural experience. The study examines critical questions of the nature of such cultural encounters especially in l…
This study concerns the constitution of the subjectivities and identities of rural-to-urban migrant women and the ways they re-make urban space in Turkey. Based on fifty life-story interviews conducted in a district of Istanbul (called Esenyurt) during 2001-02, I argue that stor…
Based on 12 months of fieldwork in Istanbul and Ankara, my dissertation aims at providing a critical reading of Turkish modernity and its reflection in the health realm through an investigation of the illness narratives of cancer patients. It also explores the interactions betwe…
Since the 1906 Constitutional Revolution that established the first representative government in the Middle East, all Iranian regimes have aimed to build a modern nation-state. But the main body of the literature depicts the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which resulted in the establi…
Youth runaways shape cosmopolitan identities, the city, and global flows in Tehran, Iran. How female runaway youth in the Iranian capital use the very classificatory markers that have differentiated them as either mischievous adolescents (rebels), or more frequently, as the embo…
This dissertation explores the transformations that took place in Turkish political culture at the end of the twentieth century that shifted boundaries between political and apolitical, public and private. It focuses on the privatization of the Kemalist state ideology and politi…
With the increasing number of women participating in the global economy, EU governments have recently recognized the necessity for Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) (Cryer, et al., 1991; Gallagher et al., 1999; Lubeck, 2001; OECD, 2001; Tietze & Cryer, 1999). This attent…
The central argument of my dissertation is that a primary characteristic of Turkish modernity is that the domains of state, Islam, and the market, in all the multiplicities each entails, struggle for economic, social, and cultural control. Yet, they are not entirely oppositional…
How did the apartment, as a built form, as a setting for everyday domestic life, and as a concept, contribute to forming modern consciousness in Turkey? This dissertation examines the social, cultural, political, economic, and architectural aspects of urban apartments between th…
Much of the difficulty so far with regards to the integration of psychology and Christianity can be linked to the structural failures postmodern theory identifies within modernist philosophy. Arguing that modernity can be found at the heart of both liberal and conservative ends …
This ethnography examines struggles over Cherkess identity in Eskisehir, Turkey following the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1989. Its analysis of 'the question of identity' is grounded in the dialectics of hegemonic processes and their power to constitute subjects as agents. W…
This dissertation research is a historical-archival study of the role that interactions between Turkish elites and European and North American intellectuals played in the construction of Turkish national and racial identities in early Republican history (1923-1950). While racism…
Latin Americans practice reproductive management at rates comparable with Western Europe and North America, a counterintuitive finding given the region's staunchly Catholic past. This paper examines the discourses on Christianity and modernity which, together, shape much of Lati…