Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2024, Media and Communication

This study utilizes an experimental design to explore how different frames impact individuals' perceptions of Muslim women when portrayed in news coverage of protests from the Middle East and North Africa region. Specifically, this research investigates the influence of news media frames on U.S. public perceptions of Muslim women activists, focusing on the impact of the hijab to test various perspectives related to minorities, gender, and stereotypical representations. In addition to examining the effect of text (positive and negative frames) and visuals (no visuals, visuals featuring veiled Muslim women, and visuals of unveiled Muslim women) on perceptions, this study also analyzes the influence of the interaction effect of the text and visual frames. This dissertation employed a factorial design, utilizing Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to conduct an online experiment. Participants were exposed to different news frames describing protests to assess their perceptions of Muslim women activists. One of the key findings of this study highlights the influence of Western-centric notions on perceptions of Muslims. Results demonstrated that positive text frames accompanied by visuals featuring unveiled women facilitated more positive implicit perceptions compared to negative frames. However, exposure to visuals featuring veiled women fostered more support toward Muslim women's protests compared to those exposed to unveiled visuals, regardless of whether the text frame is positive or negative. Additionally, results exhibited that preexisting stereotypes of oppression and victimization, along with interactions with Muslims, emerged as the most influential predictors in shaping perceptions. iv Based on the results, the author urges editors and journalists to carefully consider the goal of their coverage of protest news from the Middle East to ensure accurate and balanced portrayals that contribute to greater social inclusion, diversity, and equity in media discourse. The (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2024, Art History (Fine Arts)

The ideology of the Islamic revolution has influenced the representation of Iranian women in photography after the 1979 revolution. Typically, women are portrayed passively, even in fine art photography, and their representation is often isolated and objective. Equality movements for Iranian women's rights have periodically existed in the years after the 1979 Revolution. However, with the expansion of social networks, photography plays a significant role in the representation of Iranian women and in creating an image in contrast to the previously passive Iranian woman who was repressed and socially excluded. The influence of social networks and photography on the representation of women's bodies in Iran can be traced back to 2017, with the repetitive of Vida Movahed's figure, whose photo protesting the mandatory hijab led to the display of similar images. The influence of photography in turning women's figures into memes has expanded in Iran and worldwide, especially after the moral police killed Mahsa Amini in September 2022 over the issue of hijab. Many Iranian women are inspired to join the WLF/Woman, Life, Freedom movement after seeing viral images of other female figures. These images capture the figures of schoolgirls, protesters cutting their hair, and individual female figures that resemble the iconic figure of Vida Movahed. The WLF representatives can be seen in these photos, and the movement continues growing as more women participate. In this research, I analyzed the street photos of the Women, Life, Freedom movement in 2022 using anthropological and interview methods. In addition, interviews with Iranian photographers and their lived experiences show that due to the oppression system of the current regime of Iran regarding the female bodies and femineity, representation of the body was one of the concerns of their art formation. Furthermore, this research analyzes how Western magazines, like Time, portray the visual culture of the Middle East and Iran. (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

Work on the Agreement systems of Modern Arabic varieties often provides diachronic explanations for the variations seen in modern Arabic varieties, leaving aside how the variation manifests. For example, Bettega and D'Anna (2022) have argued that an individuation system operated in a prior state of Arabic, and the current agreement patterns represent the gradual loss of this system. Versteegh (1984) has argued that Arabic was simplified due to contact, and agreement patterns reflect that contact. Grammarians of modern Arabic varieties often compare it to Modern Standard Arabic, focusing on the difference between the modern varieties and the standard. I explore the linguistic situation of 6 varieties (Modern Standard Arabic, Beirut, Cairo, Doha, Rabat, Tunis) using a parallel multi-dialectal corpus. Through this exploration, I argue that the focus on diachronic development is premature. Instead, in order to understand the development of agreement, we must first understand the variation present in the synchronic situation. In particular, the data shows that there is a continuum of agreement systems from those most like Modern Standard Arabic with defective agreement to those without evidence for the Modern Standard Arabic system. However, this data does not suggest that the systems differ in geographical distance as would be predicted by areal diffusion. Instead, animacy is shown to affect the selection of agreement in Modern Standard Arabic, Cairo, and Doha. I argue that the deflected agreement rule of Modern Standard Arabic has been overly used as a foil to the rules of the dialects and claim that in order to understand the development of agreement in Arabic, we must look at its variation in modern varieties.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2024, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

Kurdish cinema represents a vital transnational and global art form that bridges the Kurdish community, uniting a stateless people through cultural expression. This dissertation explores common narrative threads of Kurdish cinema relating to identity, statelessness, trauma, and women's issues, despite the differences between Kurds of various nationalities in both the ancestral Kurdistan region and the diaspora. The first chapter examines how these artworks confront issues of identity, exile, and homeland. The second interrogates depictions of individual and collective trauma in Kurdish cinema, especially generational trauma resulting from racism, conflict, and displacement. Chapter 3 analyzes Kurdish cinema from a comparative perspective through the lens of Indigenous studies, examining how Kurdish cinema confronts settler-colonial oppression. The fourth and final chapter addresses the portrayal of Kurdish women's issues in Kurdish cinema, contrasting how male and female directors represent these issues and emphasizing the vital contributions of Kurdish women filmmakers especially with regard to telling Kurdish women's stories. Ultimately this work positions Kurdish cinema as a powerful artistic movement spanning national and international boundaries driven by the efforts of a distinct filmmaking community united in the desire to represent Kurdish identity and culture through cinematic storytelling.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2024, Media and Communication

The World Bank classifies the Lebanese economic crisis as one of the 10 worst such crises globally since the 19th century—and possibly one of the top three. Azma fawq ‘azma [crisis upon crisis] includes financial collapse, inability to care for 1.5 million refugees, the highest number of refugees per capita in the world, the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic on an already fragile healthcare system, and the catastrophic explosion in Beirut, one of the worst non-nuclear explosions in human history, that killed 218 people, injured 7,000, and left 300,000 unhoused. Due to unprecedented levels of inflation, the Lebanese pound has lost 90% of its value, food prices have risen 500%, and 80% of the population lives in poverty. These crises have transformed Lebanon from a beacon of success to a failed state. Given the severe lack of organizational communication research in the Mashreq (Middle East), this dissertation is of particular importance as it fills a critical gap in research. The dissertation takes an interdisciplinary approach to examine how NGOs mobilize support, provide services, and engage in interorganizational collaboration to support citizens, residents, and asylum seekers struggling to survive in Lebanon. The triangulated methodological approach includes policy analysis, two phases of field research in Lebanon, and in-depth interviews with leaders, administrators, employees, and volunteers representing 52 NGOs. Interview respondents (n = 64) provided first-hand experiences, insights, and assessments of NGOs' efforts to combat intersecting crises, reflected on the complexity of these crises, and highlighted the need for economic and political reform to assuage the feelings of being trapped in the azma fawq ‘azma. Emergent themes include the importance of collective identity through interorganizational collaboration, the benefits of group cohesion in providing support and services, a sense of purpose that has expanded alongside the crises, a continuing (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2023, Popular Culture

This thesis explores the stereotypical image of Arabs in Hollywood films from the era of silent films to contemporary productions. It investigates the reasons, circumstances, and reactions that have shaped the stereotypical portrayal of Arabs in these films. This thesis focuses on three specific films: The Sheik (1921), from the silent movies era; Rules of Engagement (2000), prior to the events of September 11; and Syriana (2005), produced after silent movies and September 11 events. Several other films are also occasionally examined to understand the stereotypical representations of Arabs in each time period, covering the 1920s through the 2010s. This thesis uses textual and visual analysis to analyze the films and understand what the movie directors perceive as Arab culture in these movies. Therefore, the first chapter analyzes old movies, from the beginnings of the Arab characters in Hollywood to movies before the Gulf War 1990-1991. The second chapter explores the movies covering the post-Gulf War to recent times. The third chapter presents the results of academic studies and the opinions of notable American and Arab scholars and authors regarding the stereotypical image of Arabs in American cinema. The thesis shows that historical events have had the most significant impact on the portrayal of a negative stereotype of Arabs in Hollywood films. Additionally, the ignorance of Arab culture and the perception of European superiority over other nations and races created factors to this stereotype. Moreover, the absence of Arabs from the Hollywood film industry has played a significant role in the distorted and unnatural portrayal of Arabs in American cinema.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2023, Mass Communication (Communication)

This research investigated the audience's viewpoint of Al-Jazeera's Opposite Direction talk show and sought to establish a practical framework for how mass media can uphold their agenda-setting and framing power while disseminating critical, unbiased, resistant-to-state-dominance, and methodical discourse in the Middle East. This region lacks freedom of speech in its media landscape. Respondents (n = 104) completed an online survey to gather their perspectives about the program. Pearson's correlation coefficients and linear regression analyses were used to analyze the data. Based on the findings, the researcher found that from the perspectives of participants, the talk show was successful in setting the agenda and framing perspective due to its critical content, level of freedom, professionalism of the host, context of discussions, and using familiar and popular terms during discussions. These key concepts were statistically significant in contributing to the program's popularity and influence. The concepts identified offer a practical framework for maintaining mass media's power of agenda-setting and shaping perspectives, particularly in the current era of media fragmentation in the Middle East.

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2023, Philosophy

This paper examines the interaction between politics, Islamic law, and state governance by challenging Wael Hallaq's thesis on the inherent incompatibility between the modern state and Islamic law. I support my analysis by employing theoretical critiques and various case studies, and by drawing on the relationship between Islamic law and state governance in colonial and postcolonial Sudan. I also demonstrate the role of aesthetic expression in developing Islamic political sensibilities, the formation of moral Muslim subjects through rituals and practices, and the significance of vernacular politics. Furthermore, my paper highlights the limitations of studying the Islamic state by focusing exclusively on the writings of Islamist intellectuals and on Western political categories. This thesis demonstrates the potential for more diverse and creative modes of Islamic governance within the framework of the modern state, despite the contradictions that come with such an endeavor.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Music

Following the large-scale migration of Syrian refugees to Europe in 2015, German music organizations and professional Syrian refugee musicians established intercultural music activities throughout the country. Ethnographic inquiry reveals that these activities develop under the pressure of a variety of social and political forces. Systemic racial inequities in Western Europe have shaped supranational and national intercultural policies, as well as the German public, to visually and sonically perceive Syrian refugees as non-European Others. Professional musicians Aeham Ahmad and the Syrian Expat Philharmonic Orchestra perform musics that defy generic classifications that categorize people by race or place of origin. Yet German media consistently ties these musicians' performances to their refugee status and relation to the “Orient.” Within this network of intercultural activities, three amateur ensembles in Hamburg differ in choosing to be open to all refugees regardless of background, or exclude refugees based on Western perceptions of musical skill. This dissertation finds that integration through intercultural music-making in northern Germany is a process that Germans sometimes use to distinguish themselves from racialized refugees. Even so, Syrian professional musicians and amateur ensembles resist essentialized identities and model more equitable and compassionate ways to welcome refugees through intercultural music performance.

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2023, Political Science (Arts and Sciences)

The Chechens & Chechen national movement have a turbulent history with Russia which includes assassinations, staged bombings, two-wars, and genocide. The separatist movement itself has seen both its highs and lows, but when failed at certain points in history, transformed into other types of identity movements. This thesis uses public theologies framework to analyze how this transformation happened and argues that what exactly the movement transforms into varies on the time period, the space the movements operate in, and the spiritual meanings associated with belonging and nationalism. It identifies three distinct public theologies of belonging among the Chechens: those of the nationalist-separatists; jihadis; and the Kadyrov followers.

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2022, English

In this thesis, I examine the ways in which race, ethnicity, and the raced body are written into the Census as a document of technical writing. The United States Census is the key site of inquiry that I examine in analyzing and articulating a rhetoric surrounding race and identity. While the Census does not dictate the ways how ethnicity is made visible or erased or the ways in which race is reified; the ways in which conceptions of race and racism permeate American society are complex and too large for the scope of one conference proposal or project. The Census, however, is an important technical document that tracks identities and demographics in America. And as a governmental document, its use in public discourse impacts minority communities such as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Hispanic Americans, as well as other minoritized communities like migrants or refugees. In this thesis, I use this analysis of the Census document to focus on Middle Eastern identity and its relationship to race, ethnicity, and the raced body in technical writing, and seek to use this study to develop a theory of delivering identity through writing.

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2022, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the process by which the American Yazidi ethno-religious community of Lincoln, Nebraska preserves and transmits its culture and identity in a diasporic setting. This research seeks to contribute to new knowledge on how ethnic and religious immigrant communities negotiate questions of identity and cultural preservation, particularly in the context of historical or ongoing persecution in their native homelands. Utilizing ethnography, participant observation, and unstructured interviews, this research examines the mutually supporting individual and collective efforts to preserve Yazidi identity and cultural attributes, including heritage language instruction, civil society participation, artistic expression, trauma processing, and both local and transnational social relations. The research also canvasses the attitudes of Yazidis to better understand the centrality of inter-generational cultural transmission and the challenges of maintaining a distinct ethno-religious identity while integrating into a new society.

BA, Oberlin College, 2022, Politics

This thesis seeks to understand the conditions in the United States post-9/11 that enabled the Bush administration to pursue a wide-ranging and all-encompassing “War on Terror,” with substantial support from the general public. I am principally focused on two significant facets of the War on Terror: the invasion of Iraq and the establishment of a permanent security state (and the interrelated creation of a new state of exception). I ask why the George W. Bush administration was so successful in generating support for both the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and for policies that violated fundamental civil liberties; I argue that the Bush administration, with substantial collaboration from mainstream mass media, was able to effectively instigate a moral panic as a result of the pre-existing widespread belief in American exceptionalism, as well as the prevalence of deeply rooted colonialist ideology, among the general public. Relatedly, I assert that the post-9/11 moment, including both the cultural reaction to the attacks and post-9/11 foreign policy, cannot be understood without first examining the significant political and cultural shifts that took place during and after the Cold War, among both the general public and among political elites. I then argue that this moral panic, which was actively cultivated by the Bush administration and many fixtures in the media, enabled Bush to implement policies and practices that violated domestic and/or international law with minimal backlash from the American public, and in many cases, even received enthusiastic support. These policies and practices established, and then further entrenched, a permanent state of exception centered principally around “homeland security.”

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2022, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

This dissertation investigates the works, thoughts, and practices of everyday life of a diverse range of emerging contemporary Syrian artists and filmmakers who created art during the Syrian crisis since 2011. Some stayed in Syria. Others fled the country. Some engaged in armed resistance or political activism. Others lost their lives. This dissertation is primarily concerned with how these individuals created art that reflected the everyday life of Syrians throughout the crisis. The focus on everyday life is crucial because it shifts scholarly attention on the Syrian crisis away from the war itself and onto the overlooked Syrians who are creatively trying to survive it. Drawing on interviews, aesthetic analysis, and participant-observation, I argue that Syrian artists try to reclaim the Syrian identity and homeland concepts back to their cultural heritages and away from political or war realities. In addition, I discuss a new model of the Syrian body of survival and its representations based on its transformations between different modes of survival practices. This dissertation seeks to enrich art history, Performance Studies, and scholarly approaches to the Syrian crisis by positioning Syrian art as a global and contemporary art phenomenon and by documenting, preserving, analyzing, and presenting its artists to the international public. It pays particular attention to Syrian art's local, regional, and global specificity while also considering how the artworks and films are produced, distributed, and presented across international art arenas. The ultimate goal of this dissertation is to clarify what it means to be Syrian today, a concept that has been mostly unrepresented, misrepresented, or distorted by stereotyping.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Linguistics

There is rich diversity in New Iranian nominal systems reflecting retentions from a common Old Iranian ancestor and many significant innovations. My primary aim is to engage in a discussion of the typological richness of inflection among these languages as comprehensively as possible. This work represents a combination of synchronic and diachronic linguistics, where a thorough theoretically anchored synchronic analysis feeds my otherwise diachronic study. I have divided the work into distinct sections that represent issues concerning the nominal morphology of the Iranian languages, focusing on those spoken in the Kurdish zone. These sections, taken together, demonstrate the breadth of issues concerning New Iranian nominal morphology. I begin with a typological overview of nominal systems in New Iranian languages focusing on the interaction of case, number, gender, and attribution marking. At the intersection of these features exist several patterns that establish the issues addressed in subsequent sections. Perhaps the most well-studied phenomenon in Iranian nominal morphology is the ezafe (attribution marker). Here, I break from previous work on the ezafe phenomenon by describing the syntactic combinatorics of the various attribution/possession strategies in New Iranian languages in a categorial framework (HTLCG). This analysis unifies two facts of Iranian languages: (1) adjectives are both attributive and substantive, and (2) nouns are the marked entity in attributive constructions. I use the principles established in my discussion of the ezafe to unify the analysis of the Iranian noun-phrase syntax and nominal morphology based on foundational assumptions of inferential–realizational morphology and Categorial Grammar. Additionally, I propose several novel solutions to issues in Iranian historical morphology.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, History

This dissertation explores how a modern historical consciousness developed during the late Ottoman and early Republican Turkish periods (roughly between the 1840s and the 1930s). By examining the transformation of modern history writing from an imperial context to a national one, this study analyzes how institutionalization, professionalization and the gradual nationalization of Ottoman and Turkish history writing shaped historical production in this period. Existing scholarship on late nineteenth and early twentieth century history writing has long argued that the emergence of modern history writing in the Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey was a mere adaptation of European historiographical trends. This dissertation, however, evaluates the role of both internal and external conditions that played a major role in the development of modern history writing. It argues that internal political and cultural dynamics, including constitutional and nationalist movements, changes in the state's educational policies and the emergence of learned societies, as well as external factors, such as the arrival of Muslim emigre intellectuals from the Russian Empire, affected historiographical trends in late Ottoman and early Republican Turkish society. Additionally, by focusing on how late Ottoman historical institutions and intellectual trends were appropriated by the newly founded Turkish Republic, this study accentuates the continuity of history writing practices between the Ottoman Empire and Turkey.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

Examining language and performance in Tunisia since the 2011 revolution provides insight into the changing dynamics of the linguistic situation and the society. Previous studies of Arabic-speaking communities have too often employed diglossia as a faithful description of reality rather than as an ideology or useful framework for conducting research. Similarly, prestige as a variable has been ill-defined when applied to many Arabic sociolinguistic studies. This research aims at more thoroughly interrogating prestige as a sociolinguistic variable that is negotiated in each social performance, influenced by previous encounters and ideologies but not dictated by them. The samples for this research are drawn from YouTube videos of speeches by presidents and presidential candidates, a news broadcast, a cooking show, and a soap opera, as well as a post by Tunisian Instagrammers. This selection effectively demonstrates how the nuances of each performance impact the type of language used. Furthermore, analysis of the comments left about these various media make it clear that the democratization process led to a dramatic increase in the number of Tunisians interacting in online spaces thus elevating Tunisian Arabic in written forms and giving voice to the opinions of everyday people in a wider variety of discussions. This approach and the resultant analysis challenge traditional notions of Arabic diglossia as well as sociolinguistic theories of language prestige by rooting the discussion in actual practice rather than on ideological interpretations.

PHD, Kent State University, 2021, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies

Over the last two decades, researchers have shown an increased interest in studying gender-related issues in the translations of the Quran (Hassen, 2012; Maliki, 2015; Hassen, 2018). Existing research recognizes the influence of translators' ideologies on their translation of gender in the Quran. However, this research has relied on subjective approaches and small-scale qualitative analysis. The existing studies (Habibeh Khosravi & Majid Pourmohammadi, 2016; Maliki, 2015; Hassen, 2012; Herrag, 2012) tend to focus on a limited number of verses known to be problematic with regard to our understanding of gender and provide an in-depth textual analysis of excerpts from different translations. These micro-level methodologies fail to account for all the instances of reference to women in the texts and subsequently cannot provide a comprehensive picture of the representation of women in the translations of the Quran. Quantitative methods are needed to provide a systematic, more objective, large-scale analysis to account for all the instances of reference to women and to take into consideration the whole discourse defining and describing women in these translations. Thus, the present study employs, for the first time, a combination of qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA), (an analytical approach for critically investigating the ways in which discourses construct, maintain and legitimize social inequalities) and quantitative corpus-based methods to investigate how women are translated in five different English translations of the Quran. The use of mixed methods analysis offers a balanced way to study gender in translation. While corpus methods provide a point of entry to the data through frequencies, collocates and concordances, CDA uncovers the connection between the text and the ideology of the translator. The findings make an important contribution to the theory and praxis of feminist translation by extending its boundaries to include nonwestern percep (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Geography

This dissertation calls into question dominant frames of territory by critically evaluating their ontological and epistemological assumptions. Relieving the temporal of its treatment as a controlled variable in spatial analysis, I conceptualize an ontology of dyslocation, informed by a methodology of nautical charting. The theoretical framework takes shape through considerations of the contested territory of Palestine-Israel. Through the case of Palestine-Israel, I argue that the territorial frames we are conditioned to use obfuscate actually existing complexities in ways that hinder the work toward just and sovereign futures in Palestine-Israel and beyond. These arguments develop through visual analysis of the Palestinian Land Loss Map and ethnographic analysis from immersive fieldwork among Palestine solidarity workers in Chicago.

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Toledo, 2020, Health Education

Introduction: In 2017, the United States' foreign-born population was 44.5 million, which represented 13.7% of the total U.S. population, and this number is projected to reach 78.2 million by 2065 (Immigration Policy Institute; Pew Research Center, 2019). Approximately 1.8 million (4.1%) are from the Middle Eastern countries located in Western Asia, including Armenia, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Yemen, Egypt, and Iran. Middle Eastern Americans are recent immigrants to the U.S. The number of deaths due to breast cancer is expected to increase from 42,228 in 2012 to 74,181 in 2030 due to survival rates being lower than in regions such as the Americas and Europe (WHO, 2019). In comparison, in the U.S., cancer is the second leading cause of death, while one in four deaths is due to cancer. In 2019, there were 268,000 new breast cancer cases in the U.S. and 41,760 deaths (CDC, 2019). Many Americans have well-known major risk factors for breast cancers due to behavioral factors such as tobacco and alcohol use, unhealthy diet, physical inactivity, and some chronic infections. In addition to behavioral factors, family history is also a risk factor for developing breast cancer. Mortality disparities may be due to the patient's access to health care, education, and SES. Most deaths from cancer occur during the first five years after being diagnosed. As shown in cancer research, cancer mortality rates can be reduced if detected and treated early. Previous research indicated increased mortality rates due to breast cancer being diagnosed at an advanced stage among foreign-born Middle Eastern women in the U.S. (Hasnain, Menon, Ferrans, & Szalacha, 2014). In the U.S., research that explains Middle Eastern Americans' health compared to the health of other ethnic groups such as Hispanics or African Americans is limited, primarily related to their breast cancer screening behavior. Few studies examined the breast cancer screening behavior of (open full item for complete abstract)