This thesis investigates the profession of conference interpreting, adopting a comparative analysis of the profession as a social practice in the United Kingdom and Japan. Conference interpreting is a specialised, cognitively challenging oral language translation service, used i…
From its origins in Arabia, to its flowering in the greater Near East, Islam was heir to many different societies, each of which exhibited multiple levels of social stratification. While the elimination of all status divisions was not a goal of early Muslims, certain claims to s…
This study is an investigation into the semiotics of carved ivory objects in the Frankish Empire of the ninth and early tenth centuries. It argues that a number of distinctive social practices involving ivory emerged in this period that made carved ivory a newly desirable catego…
My dissertation is based on eighteen months of research conducted in Jimma, Ethiopia, a city of 120,000. Jimma is typical of urban Ethiopia in that unemployment rates for youth are close to fifty percent. The dissertation examines the manner in which unemployed and working youth…
This study examines each speech in the Book of Job as rhetorical discourse, a crafted response to a specific rhetorical situation. As Bitzer theorizes, a rhetorical situation comprises exigences and constraints that both elicit a speech and influence its form and content. For th…
This study examines the effects of both current and past Sudanese government policies regarding Islamization and Arabization on the roles and status of Nuban women. Societal ills that have resulted from the war such as slavery, discrimination, displacement and rape are discussed…
For millennia, ancient civilizations of the Near East pondered the important psychological questions posed by death. The funerary portraits produced by the desert kingdom of Palmyra from the first century B.C. to the destruction of the city by the Romans in A.D. 273 present some…
The Amazigh (Berber) communities that inhabit the Rif region of northern Morocco have long depended on migration to overcome challenges faced by severe droughts, soil erosion, and a poor infrastructure, the effects of which are exacerbated by a long-held sense of political margi…
The Construction of 'Child' in the Ancient Near East: Towards an Understanding of the Legal and Social Status of Children in Biblical Israel and Surrounding Cultures examines how ancient Near Eastern societies viewed the children in their communities. Recognizing that there is n…