Browsing by Subject "Solidarity"
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Item Digital intifada : a discourse analysis of the Palestine solidarity groups in social media(2016-08) Almahmoud, Meshaal Abdullah; Atkinson, Lucinda; Love, BradfordThis thesis investigates the discourse adopted by Palestine solidarity groups utilizing Facebook. Three pro-Palestine groups were highlighted as a case study for this thesis: Palestine Solidarity Campaign, International Solidarity Movement and Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement. The research questions address the methods of discourse Palestinian solidarity groups' employ, utilization of different contents and themes, level of engagement, selection of format, news resources, and impact of 2014 Gaza war. This study analyzes variations among the three groups and components influencing differentiations. The literature review highlights transformation in both individual and collective communication and social media's changing social and political structures. Research includes the usage of social media to frame social movements’ platform and social media benefits for collective action and how framing is achieved and collective identity developed. Lastly, it illuminates the trend of connective action and personalization. The discourse analysis approach was applied to investigate the set of selected Facebook posts in 2014. The results show that the three solidarity groups generally applied resource mobilization theory. Posts reporting some form of a violation contained the most correlating content. Human rights theme rose to the majority of the total number of posts. The most used contents in the posts aim for audience sympathy, responsibility and being connected, as for a shared pursuit to occur. Reporting a violation, the most used content, triggers sympathy. Responsibility is motivated by calling followers for action, which is the second most used content by all groups. Reporting news as applied to many types of top used contents, resulted in the group member's feeling connected. The total average engagement for the three groups multiplied highly during the war in Gaza, but sank considerably after termination of the war. However, the average engagement subsequent to the war remains markedly higher than pre-war levels. The patterns of posting revealed tendencies not to post only text, without attaching another format. Posts with links or photo account for a higher proportion. The majority of the three solidarity groups' news resources come from five pro-Palestinian major news websites. Yet, numerous international sources, either mainstream or independent media, were utilized as well.Item Humility, trauma, and solidarity : the rhetoric of sensitivity(2016-05-18) Gerdes, Kendall Joy; Davis, D. Diane (Debra Diane), 1963-; Cvetkovich, Ann; Gunn, Joshua; Roberts-Miller, Patricia; Walker, JeffreyHumility, Trauma, and Solidarity: The Rhetoric of Sensitivity enters a conversation in rhetorical studies about the agency, effectivity, and conditions of possibility for the rhetorical subject. This project is an exploration in several registers of the preoriginary affectability that Diane Davis has called "rhetoricity." Rhetoricity exposes existents to affection from outside in a structure of addressivity that is fundamentally rhetorical. Prior to individuation as a subject, rhetoricity implies that beings are differentiated first through response to an address or call. This extra-symbolic affection brings one into being as the subject of a rhetorical relation. This project aims to inscribe the valences of rhetoricity: its traumatic force, and even violence, but also its generation of the possibility for becoming otherwise. These valences are charted through chapters on reading and addiction, sensitivity, and identification in hypertext video games. In "Addiction, Humility, and Rhetoricity," I explore the uncontrollable relationality of addiction through a reading of David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest. I argue that an addictive habit, even reading habits, indicate the radical affectability of the subject. Rhetorical exposedness is a route of access to one's interiority that cannot be totally blocked off. The next chapter examines the public controversy over the use of trigger warnings in college classes. "Sensitive Students" argues that students' experiences of trauma mark an exposition to affection that makes teaching possible. In the final chapter, "Twisted Together: Twine Games and Solidarity," I argue that a set of hypertext video games made by transgender women are contesting the dominant values of gamer culture. By confronting players with an alterity internal to identification, these games erode the centrality of identification to rhetoric and forward solidarity as a shared relation to difference instead. This project traces the ways that gender marks and even constitutes the rhetorical structure of address. Sensitivity, receptivity, and exposedness are sites of gendering marks that persist and reverberate into the very formation of the rhetorical subject. This project opens a way for rhetoricians to frame exposedness as a rhetorical moment of ethicity: as being outside oneself, being beside oneself, and being for others.Item (Re)framing resistance and (re)forging solidarity : negotiating the politics of space, race, and gender in Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’ Habla La Madre(2016-05) Townsend, Phillip A.; Smith, Cherise, 1969; Chambers, EdwardThis study provides one of the first examinations of Habla La Madre, a 2014 performance by Afro-Cuban artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons launched in the Guggenheim Museum. The performance stems from practices that resulted in the marginalization and exclusion of artists of color from hegemonic cultural institutions such as the Guggenheim. Habla La Madre concerns itself with the politics of identity in its desire to function as a tool for (re)building African Diasporic solidarity. The project looks at historical, cultural, religious, and mythological texts in order to investigate Habla La Madre as a manifestation of Campos-Pons’ hybridized “exilic,” “female,” “African,” and “Cuban” identities. (Re)Framing Resistance and (Re)Forging Solidarity: Negotiating the Politics of Space, Race, and Gender in Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’ Habla La Madre situates the performance in a history of public performative acts of resistance enacted by enslaved Africans, Afro-Cubans, and African American communities which is a primary goal of this study. The project pays close attention to Habla La Madre as it intersects with the politics of space. A critical objective of this study is to understand the sociopolitical implications of Campos-Pons’ acts of spatial transformation and spatial appropriation around and within the museum. The project also looks at Campos-Pons’ introduction of Santería into the Guggenheim as an attempt at its institutionalization. A history of African and African Diasporic altar production structures an investigation into Campos-Pons’ construction of an altar within the Guggenheim. As a performance that challenges discriminatory practices of art institutions, Habla La Madre situates itself within the genre of institutional critique. The project highlights its consistencies, deviations, and contributions to the field. This research also draws upon conversations with the artist to determine the extent to which her peers have influenced the production and goals of Habla La Madre. Most prior research on Campos-Pons focuses on her practice as mourning; however, this project focuses on the cultural diffusion and celebration the performance brings about.Item Sehar Ezez Interview(2021-07-08) Institute for Diversity & Civic LifeThis interview is with Sehar Ezez, a Pakistani-American with experience organizing with marginalized communities. Sehar talks about growing up Muslim in Alabama and the struggles her family and extended Muslim community faced in the aftermath of 9/11. She describes experiencing Islamophobic prejudice and violence when she wore hijab in college. She also discusses her involvement, tokenization, and various roles she has filled as an activist and ally.Item Stories as capacious objects : narratives of belonging in LGBT community in Chennai, India(2015-05) Aniruddhan Vasudevan; Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961-; Stewart, KathleenThis report grows out of my observations and fieldwork notes made in the summer of 2014 in Chennai, India. It argues that when faced with conflicting pulls, varied levels of visibility and state recognition, and multiple axes of privileges, disenfranchisement and suffering, some members of the LGBT community in Chennai emphasized the importance of an additional set of implicit criteria for what constitutes solidarity: showing up; doing the work; making a timely gesture of support or help; being present in a moment of crisis; having shared experiences of fun, outrage, suffering, etc. They used narratives to emphasize friendships and longevity of associations across sexual orientation, gender identity, class, caste, etc., as a way to ameliorate the anxieties created by the questioning of solidarities. My claim is not that such a focus on relationships across social divides directly challenges or carries the potential to challenge larger social orders of gender, class, or caste in a systematic way. My desire, instead, is to focus on the very urge felt by actors involved to ameliorate through narratives the questioning of the legitimacy of the idea of a community. My aim has been to understand what attitudes to relationships and solidarities and what kinds of connections, affect, and slantedness towards one another these exercises reveal.Item Your work is not here : solidarity tourism in occupied Palestine(2015-05) Kelly, Jennifer Lynn, 1982-; Harlow, Barbara, 1948-2017; Paik, A. Naomi; El-Ariss, Tarek; Marshall, Stephen; Stewart, Kathleen; Shohat, EllaYour Work is Not Here: Solidarity Tourism in Occupied Palestine is a multi-sited ethnographic study of solidarity tourism in Palestine. Based on participant observation of solidarity tours in Israel/Palestine and interviews with guides, organizers, community members, tourists, and activists, my project traces the history of solidarity tourism in Palestine from informal delegations during the first intifada to the professionalization of alternative tourism today. I situate the turn to this organizing strategy in the historical context of the Oslo Accords, which fragmented the West Bank and simultaneously enabled unforeseen possibilities for commercial tourism in Palestine. Following the itineraries of organizers in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and inside Israel as they reject the borders and checkpoints crafted to divide them, I describe how Palestinian guides and organizers collectively use tourism to expose histories of expulsion and imagine a decolonized future for Palestine. My work details the fraught phenomenon of solidarity tourism, which requires Palestinian organizers to translate their experiences of dispossession into narratives international tourists can circulate while simultaneously underscoring international complicity in Israeli state practice. My project thus documents the affective labor of narration on the part of Palestinian guides and organizers, the contradictory politics of alliance and complicity on the part of Israeli activists, and the ethics of international, and particularly U.S., presence in Palestine as tourists. Taking as my subject a phenomenon that is often reductively constructed as either wholly exploitative or wholly redemptive, I analyze the complex ways in which solidarity tourism has emerged in Palestine as a viable organizing strategy and a business that is both embedded in and working against histories of sustained displacement. In this way, my project troubles how we understand “solidarity” and how we understand “tourism,” looking not only at the limitations of each, nor only at their radical potential, but at the uneven and asymmetrical ways they take shape in colonial contexts