Thesiss

In this dissertation, I analyze religious actors debating the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 as well as the religious cultural dimensions of the larger public discussion. I argue that one cannot adequately explain the country's entry into the war without understanding the…

The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 had an overwhelming geopolitical impact on Western Europe which included a discursive shift that depended greatly on the ideological construction of this event by its contemporaries for its consequences. In other words, the nature o…

Due to the global nature of capital flows and advances in communication and transportation technologies, a growing number of immigrants live transnational lives. The ability to maintain a connection to the homeland informs how people construct institutions and identities in the …

This project examines the role that the Cold War discourse plays in informing and structuring the Russian and US mainstream and alternative news media narratives about international events and controversies that occur in the post-Cold War time but trace their historical roots to…

Taking an intersectional approach, I show how news media portrayals of neoliberal welfare reform and welfare rights movements are rooted in culture-specific racial and gendered ideologies. Using critical discourse analysis in combination with frame analysis, I analyze 462 articl…

Pressure to standardize curriculum, assessment, and instruction is rapidly whittling perceptions of what counts as literacy in public schools. Educators risk fostering compliance and cementing preconceived categorization of students, rather than critical thinking when orderlines…

This dissertation focuses on public discourse in Egypt from 2000 to 2010 under Mubarak's authoritarian regime, which placed severe restrictions on public conversation. I ask the following question: Why, in a highly repressive, authoritarian state, were relatively weak, underpriv…

The prosody of the stanzaic poems called madrasê, written in Syriac by Ephrem of Nisibis in the fourth century, has long been studied by scholars. Until now, these studies have focused on meter, but this has left many questions unanswered. The present study examines the intercla…

This dissertation research examined the operation, circulation, and articulation of discourses associated with contemporary globalization in producing the agricultural landscape of an area of rural Jamaica. As a part of the world subject to European colonial domination from the …

This paper presents the results of a critical discourse analysis of a selection of Canada's security texts and argues that the country's security discourses construct Muslims as dangerous and different from the normative Canadian. The research relies on a social constructionist …

Although they are both accounts of events, the history and the novel are not commensurate; the novel’s content is usually considered as opposed to that of history. It is assumed that history relates real things whereas the novel excels in dealing with the imagination (fiction). …

The decade of the 1990s concerned itself primarily with the nostalgic renegotiation of the past. Contemporary culture has looked to the past as a way to redefine the present and look to the future. James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic capitalized on this reinvestment of the past, u…

Many scholars, critics and popular culture agree that colonialism has impoverished, marginalized, destabilized and deprived Africa of her voice for years. Africa has been in danger of losing its identity within the global economy by fast internalizing an array of colonial cultur…

This dissertation is an archaelogical reading of how the Cappadocians Fathers, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa, moved through a theory of the limitations of language to the production and reception of theological discourse. Within the context of the fourth-centu…

Many theological scholars have contributed to the process of interpreting the Psalms. However, most of them have done so based upon pre-determined genre classified by taxonomical categories, the historical socio-religious setting, and assumed theological messages. While these fa…

This study investigated the reactions of American professors to the written prose of non-native speaking international students in their classes. The need for a clear understanding of the specific nature of the writing required in particular content areas has been recently stres…

The Arab-American community lies at the nexus of intersecting lines of political power, and is subject to pervasive discursive misrecognition, that is, the limiting of members' ability to act as persons capable of taking any position in ongoing social and political discourses. E…

This study demonstrates the centrality of the legitimation processes of the paradoxical nature of the "battle over immigration" regarding the Senate Bill 1070 in Arizona. Through historical and critical discourse analysis, I illustrate how the language in the immigration debate …

The project, using the world culture theory, explores how modern international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) which provide humanitarian charitable relief assistance have enacted, innovated, and adapted to changes in the broader world culture over the past half century. …

This thesis is a reconstruction of the Somalia's encounter with the colonial discourse of development and its impact on indigenous farmers. It is an analysis of several narratives of Somali experts who worked for development projects in Somalia during the early 1970s and late 19…