Thesiss

Sound Recollections investigates film narratives, spatial acoustics, and software interfaces to ultimately argue that recording studio culture is continually framed through the production and consumption of wide-spread media objects. While there is a wealth of scholarship focusi…

This study in the anthropology of religion examines the relationship between Kazak ethnicity and religion, exploring how the collective memory is mediating Muslim values in Kazak culture in the 1990s. Ethnographic field research was conducted in the Kazak language from 1992 to 1…

The length, scale, and intensity of the Afghan conflict distinguish it from other conflicts worldwide. This qualitative, interdisciplinary dissertation explored violence in everyday life and constitution of memory, as experienced and encountered in the life of Afghans during the…

The present research utilizes a cultural psychological perspective and considers the extent to which representations of history reflect and promote identity-relevant concerns (i.e., national identification, perceptions of present-day injustice in Indian society). Across four stu…

The following dissertation utilizes an interdisciplinary methodology through the incorporation of the sociological theory of collective remembering as set forth by Jeffrey Olick. Olick's process-relational perspective will be utilized alongside his counter-concepts of field, gen…

This dissertation explores the differences in constructions of memory and of authorship in diasporic and national literature through a close reading of "A Guest for the Night" by S.Y. Agnon and the Yash novels by Jacob Glatstein. The reading is premised on a diasporic conception…

Journalism is a project in constant search of itself which is shaped by multiple and often contradicting impulses and forces. Using the strategic example of stories of political kidnapping and captivity, this dissertation examines the ways in which the news media—and newspapers …

In this dissertation, I examine the effect of forms of historical narratives on citizenship policies, paying special attention to the degree and the terms of inclusion of ethnic minorities. I focus on two post-imperial core countries, Turkey and Austria. I develop a framework of…

A cultural historical study of the Booth Legend, the widespread belief that John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln's assassin, was not killed following his action, but lived as a fugitive for decades afterwards. Using various sources including newspapers, popular literature, governm…

The mahalle (neighborhood) was the historic space of urban culture in the Middle East. Cities in the region possessed a rich religious and linguistic diversity. The daily life of a religious community was centered in its mahalle. This cosmopolitanism was fractured with the birth…

This dissertation maps the emergence of a ‘secularist ethics’ in post-independence South Asian literature and film, an ethics which is a deeply felt poetic response to particular historical conjunctures marked by religio-nationalist conflict in the Indian subcontinent. It is my …

As the Second World War in Europe came to an end the Russians advanced from the east towards Berlin. German occupation of Poland and Czechoslovakia had been particularly brutal. Both of these countries, products of German defeat at the end of World War I contained millions of et…

In 1989, Bulgaria started its long and complicated process of a post-communist transition. The subsequent economic, social, and political instability, accompanied by a delayed and limited process of decommunisation, shaped a fragmented and polarised narrative about the past. In …

Through interrelating the Acoustic Communication concepts of soundscape with contemporary collective memory studies, this research project explores the relationship between commuters and the London Underground (LU) soundscape in order to create an interactive sonic environment o…

This thesis looks at the evolution of the collective memory and its influence on the behaviour of the federal government, the political elites and the public opinion in Germany between 1989 and 1999. The research is based on five case studies: the Gulf War, the independence of C…

This study explores interactions between race, gender and citizenship focusing on how race and gender ideologies shape "common sense" understandings and public memories of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Cent…

This study examines how the Indonesian Chinese born after 1966 negotiate meanings about their culture and identity through their collective memory of growing up in a restrictive media environment that specifically curtailed Chinese language and culture. The restrictive media env…

This analytical ethnography provides the empirical and conceptual foundations for a theory of the emergence of social order through performative practice under conditions of uncertainty. Theoretically, the goal is to explicate ways in which uncertainty is integral to emergent so…

If narratives are the stories that we construct to make sense of our world, national narratives construct citizenship and the meaning of identity. Narratives of national identity are not constructed by individuals in isolation, but rather are collectively created. This dissertat…

This dissertation investigates the relation between collective memories of violence and contemporary sites of injustice. With the emergence of global memory discourses, cultural memory has become a vital new site of conflict, political contestation and potential dialogue between…