Browsing by Subject "Travel"
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Item Aisha Fall Interview(2022-10-10) Institute for Diversity & Civic Life; Department of Religious StudiesThis interview is with Aisha Fall, a Senegalese-American Muslim in Chicago, IL. Aisha shares memories from her childhood, including friendships, schooling, and travels to Senegal and France. She describes her time at UTSA and her involvement with the MSA there. While there, she attended the Muslim Children Education and Civic Center where she became a leader on the Youth Committee. She talks about her experience there and the influential people she worked with.Item Comfortable being uncomfortable : the study abroad experiences of Black and Latino/a students(2017-07-18) Dean, Dallawrence Edward; Vincent, Gregory J.; Reddick, Richard, 1972-; Green, Terrance; Somers, Patricia; Moore, LeonardResearch has found that study abroad experiences positively influence undergraduate baccalaureate degree attainment, career goals, and self-awareness (Gonyea, 2008). However, scholars agree there are still gaps in study abroad literature, specifically pertaining to students of color, alumni, and short-term study abroad programs (Chang, 2015; Miller-Perrin & Thompson, 2014; Norris & Gillepsie, 2009). Guided by Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning, this study aimed to understand Black and Latinx students’ perceptions of the benefits of their study abroad experiences. This study adds to the current body of literature by employing a phenomenological approach to assess the study abroad experiences of seven undergraduate students and eight alumni, all of whom identified as Black or Latinx, and participated in a short-term study abroad experience sponsored by the Southwest University (SU). Participants described how their experience of “learning to be comfortable with being uncomfortable” in a foreign country influenced their personal, social, and professional lives. The study’s findings were presented via five large themes: (1) individual awareness, (2) my friends, family, and community, (3) career development, (4) who you study abroad with matters, and (5) program design. Fifteen subthemes emerged from the larger themes: (1) Awakening American identity, (2) ethnic identity empowerment, (3) self-assurance, (4) family change of perspective, (5) social responsibility, (6) career clarification, (7) career interviews and application navigation, (8) making connections, (9) transferable skills, (10) comfortability, (11) intragroup diversity, (12) faculty/staff support, (13) study abroad preparation, (14) host destination, and (15) experiential learning.Item Fay Jones and Charles W. Moore InterviewJones, Euine Fay; Moore, Charles WillardAudio files are EID restricted. Individuals without an EID should send an email request to apl-aaa@lib.utexas.edu.Item Flying Colors: Analyzing The Impact Of Travel And Tourism On People And Their Communities(2019-05-01) Sridharan, Abhinav; Christian, GeorgeGiven the rapid increase in the accessibility of travel, the tourism industry has evolved to the point where people of all backgrounds can fly and see other countries, given the adequate financial resources. This paper explores the impact of modern travel and tourism on people and their communities. With the advent of certain technologies, both the physical and informational intricacies associated with travel have evolved considerably, providing people across the world with opportunities to connect with others and integrate with local cultures. This paper was driven by the skepticism on the commoditization of the travel industry, where people are more inclined to seek quickly packaged and curated experiences over richer interactions with the local communities of their travel destination. Through academic research and analysis of real interactions, the paper seeks to answer the following questions: Why do people travel? When did leisure travel first emerge? What are the different types of travel? How are travelers perceived by a local community? Is tourism a net positive or negative for countries? To what extent if any does traveling have on one’s cultural identity? To answer such questions, I first provide a brief background on the history of travel. I then contextualize travel in the status quo, while assessing environmental, sociocultural, and economic impacts. Next, I examine potential links between paid time off (PTO) policy, cultural identity, and one’s propensity to travel. I conclude the paper by providing my own analysis on the future trajectory of travel.Item Intertextual journeys : Xenophon’s Anabasis and Apollonius’ Argonautica on the Black Sea littoral(2014-05) Clark, Margaret Kathleen; Beck, DeborahThis paper addresses intertextual similarities of ethnographical and geographical details in Xenophon’s Anabasis and Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica and argues that these intertextualities establish a narrative timeline of Greek civilization on the Black Sea littoral. In both these works, a band of Greek travellers proceeds along the southern coast of the Black Sea, but in different directions and at vastly different narrative times. I argue that Apollonius’ text, written later than Xenophon’s, takes full advantage of these intertextualities in such a way as to retroject evidence about the landscape of the Black Sea littoral. This geographical and ethnographical information prefigures the arrival of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand in the region. By manipulating the differences in narrative time and time of composition, Apollonius sets his Argonauts up as precursors to the Ten Thousand as travellers in the Black Sea and spreaders of Greek civilization there. In Xenophon’s text, the whole Black Sea littoral becomes a liminal space of transition between non-Greek and Greek. As the Ten Thousand travel westward and get closer and closer to home and Greek civilization, they encounter pockets of Greek culture throughout the Black Sea, nestled in between swaths of land inhabited by native tribes of varying and unpredictable levels of civilization. On the other hand, in the Argonautica, Apollonius sets the Argonautic voyage along the southern coast of the Black Sea coast as a direct, linear progression from Greek to non-Greek. As the Argonauts move eastward, the peoples and places they encounter become stranger and less recognizably civilized. This progression of strangeness and foreignness works to build suspense and anticipation of the Argonauts’ arrival at Aietes’ kingdom in Colchis. However, some places have already been visited before by another Greek traveller, Heracles, who appears in both the Argonautica and the Anabasis to mark the primordial progression of Greek civilization in the Black Sea region. The landscape and the peoples who inhabit it have changed in the intervening millennium of narrative time between first Heracles’, then the Argonauts’, and finally the Ten Thousand’s journey, and they show the impact of the visits of all three.Item iTrak : a social mobile diary and web blogging utility for travelers(2013-05) Dao, Tung Thanh, active 2013; Aziz, AdnaniTrak is a combined mobile and web application that takes advantage of the GPS to allow travelers to share their experience while travelling. The application gathers GPS data and broadcasts it via a web interface or social networks such as Facebook to update user’s status during a trip. iTrak is also equipped with other features such as writing notes or recording video journals to offer a rich experience and provide an interactive diary, along with a real-time tracking ability, for travelers.Item Jin-Ya Huang Interview(2022-10-27) Institute for Diversity & Civic Life; Department of Religious StudiesThis interview is with Jin-Ya Huang, an artist and immigrant from Taiwan living in Dallas, TX. Jin-Ya describes her childhood in Taiwan and memories of the stark differences between her mother’s and father’s families. She shares about coming to the States, including the challenges of her parents’ career changes and working in family restaurants. Jin-Ya talks about influences on her life both good and bad, from keeping her cultural traditions to experiencing intergenerational trauma. Content Warning: The following interview contains sensitive material. Please note that the interview includes discussion of domestic violence. This subject will be discussed at 14:52-15:43 (in the transcript p. 5) and 17:17-18:45 (in the transcript p. 6). The interview also includes reference to an anti-Asian racial slur. This subject will be discussed at 44:04-44:22 (in the transcript p. 12).Item Karnak, Egypt 1950(1950) Moore, Charles W.This digitized film from the Charles Moore Archives documents renowned architect Charles Willard Moore’s trip to Egypt in 1950. Moore’s film is largely set in the Karnak Temple Complex. Notable Karnak ruins in the film include, the great hypostyle hall in the Precinct of Amon Re, statue of high priest Pinedjem I, site excavations, hieroglyphic encrusted obelisks and friezes, ram statues, the Gateway of Ptolemy III Euergetes, as well as panoramic views of the Nile. This film was most likely utilized by the architect for research purposes.Item The LIBERATOR Blog, December 2013(University of Texas at Austin, 2013-12) University of Texas at AustinItem Middle Eastern Studies Newsletter 2012-2013, No. 36(2012-11) Rose, Christopher; Moore, Wendy; Shuey, Kristi; Hall, Stephanie; Hamill, Katy; Paul, Andrew William; Raizen, Michal; Brustad, KristenM.R. Ghanoonparvar retires; Looking to the future; Global Professional Leadership Training; Lecture by James Gelvin (UCLA) on the Arab Spring; New Publications A Bit of Air, The Neighbors, Moon and Henna Tree; New Faculty Jonathan Kaplan; a year in Cairo; Presenting in MESA for the first time; Alumni Interviews: Sahar Aziz and Peter Glanville, Humanities outside the classroom; Teachers' Spring Break in Morocco; Persian of Iran Today.Item Mobilizing Iran : experiences of the Trans-Iranian Railway, 1850-1950(2015-05-07) Koyagi, Mikiya; Aghaie, Kamran Scot; Brower, Benjamin C; Di-Capua, Yoav; Ghanoonparvar, Mohammad R; Kashani-Sabet, FiroozehThis dissertation examines how various groups in Iran planned, imagined, constructed, operated, and used railways from the beginning of the technological imaginary in the second half of the nineteenth century to the aftermath of the completion of the Trans-Iranian Railway in the mid-twentieth century. Specifically, it analyses the experiences of such groups as “Western” statesmen and entrepreneurs, the Qajar political elite, including travelers who went abroad, merchants, landowners, tribal laborers, foreign and Iranian railway workers, modern middle-class vacationers, pilgrims, and all sorts of occupants of the railway space. By discussing intensified state-society and intra-social interactions linked to the railway project, this dissertation argues that various segments of Iranian society actively interpreted the meanings of railways, took advantage of the opportunities they presented, and sometimes wove them in heterogeneous understandings of self, community, and nation. Thus, contrary to the homogenizing vision of modernists that existing scholarship tends to privilege, the Trans-Iranian Railway project created multiple experiences with railway technology. Additionally, this dissertation makes supplementary arguments. First, by shifting focus from the centralizing state to non-state actors, it defies the temptation to narrate the history of railways in Iran through Reza Shah’s policies (r. 1925-1941). Rather, it presents the continuation of social transformations before and during the Reza Shah period as well as state-society and intra-social interactions during and after the Reza Shah period. Especially, the hitherto neglected period of the Allied occupation and its aftermath was a crucial period of transformation in explaining how Iranians experienced the railway project. Second, this dissertation demonstrates the importance of transnational connections of non-state actors at various junctures of Iran’s encounter with railways. In particular, it emphasizes Iran’s connections with its surrounding world rather than with the “West,” and thus resituates Iran in a broader regional frameworkItem Modeling side stop behavior during long distance travel using the 1995 American Travel Survey (ATS)(2006-12) LaMondia, Jeffrey; Bhat, Chandra R. (Chandrasekhar R.), 1964-This paper examines how many and the most common type of side stops a traveler or travel party makes during long-distance travel of over 100 miles or more. The research uses the 1995 American Travel Survey (ATS) because it is one of the few data sources that collects information on stops and side trips for long-distance trips. The paper utilizes two models to estimate side stop behavior: 1) an ordered probit formulation for modeling the number of side trips during long distance travel, and 2) a mixed multinomial logit formulation for modeling the most common side stop purpose during long-distance travel. A variety of variables, including trip and household characteristics, are considered in the model specification. The factors that play the largest role in determining side stop behavior are the primary purpose of the long-distance trip, whether the trip is a planned vacation or not, and the ethnicity of the travelers.Item Obaid Zia Interview(2021-10-17) Institute for Diversity & Civic Life; Department of Religious StudiesThis interview is with Obaid Zia, a pharmacist living in New York City. Obaid compares the Muslim communities and diversity present in the different communities in which he has lived, including Houston, TX. He describes the profiling and prejudice he experienced after 9/11, especially when traveling. He discusses his personal experiences of religion and the role Islam plays in his life today. Obaid also shares his experiences of being active in his high school’s Muslim Students Association and of participating in protesting following the 2017 Muslim ban.Item Reading, writing, roaming : the student abroad in Arab women's literature(2012-05) Logan, Katie Marie; El-Ariss, Tarek; Cullingford, Elizabeth“Reading, Writing, Roaming: The student abroad in Arab women’s literature” details new developments in a sub-genre of Arabic travel literature, the study abroad narrative. An increasing number of female writers, and particularly female writers born after the colonial period, study in Europe and write about their experiences in memoirs or fictionalized accounts. Their intervention in the genre offers alternative modes of cultural interaction to the binaries of power detailed in earlier narratives. They suggest a move away from earlier texts such as Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, where the binary between colonizer and colonized is inverted rather than demolished. The protagonists of Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma and Somaya Ramadan’s Leaves of Narcisuss deconstruct this binary by creating specific spaces of multiplicity and heterogeneity. These spaces can be physical, as is the cottage in which Salma rents a room, or they can be literary, like the traditions of British and Arabic literature that Ramadan’s novel brings together. The women in these narratives embark on not just travel but education, developing tools of reading and writing to help them re-construct a literary and political history. The traditions and places produced by feminine narratives alter the framework of canons and spaces defined by national terms, creating what Jahan Ramazani calls transnational “alliances of style and sensibility.” Using Kristeva’s work on women’s and monumental time, I argue that women participate in specific modes of time and space, modes defined by dynamic, cyclical changes, that allow them to create these kinds of projects. Through shared living spaces and hybridized literary traditions, Faqir and Ramadan re-write the study abroad narrative to include for a greater possibility of experiences and interactions. They appropriate a structure originally available only to privileged young men and apply it to women, even to an impoverished refugee in Salma’s case. These novels encourage readers to move beyond the colonial and even the postcolonial discourse by developing new vocabularies for discussing traditions, cultures and the value of education.Item Saleem Shabazz Interview(2021-12-22) Institute for Diversity & Civic Life; Department of Religious StudiesThis interview is with Saleem Shabazz, a retired postal worker and Air Force veteran living in Longview, TX. Saleem tells about his childhood, describing his family dynamics, the places he lived, and being Baptist in his youth. He talks about travel and work in the Air Force and being exposed to different cultures and beliefs. Saleem discusses converting to Islam and his experience of the hajj. He also talks about his engagement with his Muslim communities over the years, including being and imam for a time, and his observations on social and political change in the US.Item Sarah Pearose Interview(2021-02-27) Institute for Diversity and Civic LifeThis interview is with Sarah Pearose, an Afghan-American medical student living in San Antonio, where she grew up. Sarah comes from a family of medical professionals and attends University of Incarnate Word School of Osteopathic Medicine in pursuit of her Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degree. She speaks about growing up as the daughter of immigrants, her interest in medicine, and the lessons she values from Shia Islam. Sarah also shares her experience of deciding to wear the hijab and how that decision impacted her relationships with God, other people, and her own sense of self.Item Selling the African wilds : a history of the safari tourism industry in East Africa, 1900-1939(2015-12-02) Simmons, Trevor Mark; Louis, William Roger, 1936-; Hunt, Bruce J; Vaughn, James M; Raby, Megan; Zuelow, Eric G.E.; Lewis, JoannaThis dissertation examines the rise and development of the safari tourism industry in the British East Africa Protectorate (later Kenya) between 1900 and 1939. It shows how the establishment of British rule and the introduction of modern transportation technology made East Africa accessible and gradually transformed the region into a tourist attraction of great economic value that would come to be managed by imperial powers, advertised in a globalized marketplace, and visited by tourists who desired to hunt, photograph, and observe East Africa’s abundant wildlife on an adventure known as the “safari.” It became a lucrative business. Numerous outfitters, safari and travel companies, guides, and other safari workers entered the business and helped to make the industry a model of its kind in Africa. As the safari trade expanded and animal populations came under pressure, however, this industry began to adopt new, eco-friendly forms of wildlife tourism that could preserve the main elements of the tourist safari while reducing its toll on wildlife populations, a shift exemplified by the introduction of motorized tours, photographic and filmmaking safaris, and the quest to establish national parks. The research presented in this study, drawn from archival collections across three continents, demonstrates that the four decades between 1900 and 1939 became a crucial phase in the development of safari tourism in Kenya. During this time, safari tourism became a leading sector of the regional economy and gave rise to a highly developed commercial and institutional infrastructure that laid the foundations of modern wildlife tourism in Kenya. At the same time, the safari industry became a product of the British Empire, shaped by the laws, institutions, and attitudes of colonial rule. While the introduction of British rule and the arrival of British colonists promoted tourist development, built roads and railways, ensured a degree of security demanded by travelers, and linked foreign tourists with Africa, it also relegated indigenous Africans to subordinate positions in the industry, and forcibly relocated African settlements to make way for parks and tourist spaces. This meant that the prerogatives of the tourism industry often clashed with indigenous ideas of land use and economic management, instead serving the interests of the British community in Kenya who owned and controlled the trade. Thus, the development of safari tourism under the aegis of the British colonial state aided the material development of the industry, but also created economic, social, and racial inequalities that remain evident to the present day.Item Steven Kling Interview(2021-11-19) Institute for Diversity & Civic Life; Department of Religious StudiesThis interview is with Steven Kling, a US Army veteran and former candidate for the Texas Senate. Steven talks about growing up in conservative settings and developing progressive values along the way, including his values of strength and service. He shares his story of joining Civil Affairs in the US Army at the age of thirty and serving tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. Steven also talks about running for the Texas Senate and aiding Afghan immigrants during the Fall of Kabul.Item Tara Bonds Interview(2022-03-26) Institute for Diversity & Civic Life; Department of Religious StudiesThis interview is with Tara Bonds, an educator and librarian in Elgin, TX. Tara shares the story of a trip she took to Egypt with her grandmother after college, and how it opened her eyes to cultural diversity and intercultural connection. She then describes her first year teaching middle school, which began with the events of 9/11, and how she navigated that in the classroom and provided a safe escape for students. Tara also discusses the lasting impacts of post-9/11 legislation on every-day freedoms and national security.Item Texas Ranger, May 1948(Texas Student Publications, Inc., 1948-05) Bridges, Bill; Wade, Floyd; Yates, Bill; Nelson, C. W.; Bynum, Madeline