Browsing by Subject "War"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Healing the War Metaphor: Common Medicinal Plants and the Human Immune Function
    (2013-05-31) Smith, Carolyn
    Metaphors of war are common in medical discourse, reflecting a violent paradigm that influences our thoughts and behavior. Diseases are perceived as a threat that we must kill. Examples in herbal medicine are examined as a way to understand how our immune system works on a more complex level in order to soften the battle paradigm. Unconscious reliance on metaphors of war may prevent us from identifying cognitive obstacles that inhibit understanding of our bodies, systems of medical treatment and our relationship to the larger environment as well.
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    "Her extraordinary sufferings and services": women and war in New England and New France, 1630-1763
    (2012-05) Martino-Trutor, Gina Michelle
    In the border wars that wracked French and English colonies in northeastern North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women assumed visible, often violent roles in frontier communities that blurred the lines between military and domestic actions as well as settler and soldier identities. Scholars who have noted incidents in which women take up arms in these conflicts largely see their actions as anomalous due to a lack of context and a fragmented source base. Using sources such as petitions, diaries, laws, sermons, newspapers, letters, and chronicles, this dissertation demonstrates that, far from anomalous, these incidents resulted from government policies and cultural beliefs that prompted and even encouraged women to assume central and supporting roles in these wars. This comparative approach in studying Euro-American women in New England and New France, as well as Native women when sources permitted it, is relatively new. Women in the "northeastern borderlands" of seventeenth and eighteenth-century New England and New France remain poorly understood. This is particularly true regarding women's participation in the border wars. Often forbidden from evacuating to safety, women kept watch, worked directly with officials in administering forts, and fought alone and with their husbands when under attack. Far from marginalizing these women's actions, most important men in Euro-American societies met their activities with approval and encouragement. Political and religious leaders even used accounts of women's participation in the border wars as propaganda that served local, regional, and imperial agendas. In the eighteenth century, a greater European military presence resulted in an increased separation of the home and the front. In response, debates arose in New England over the role of the Crown in protecting settlers whose fortified towns had previously acted as a first line of defense. In New France, where the danger shifted from the St. Lawrence River Valley to the coast, women's economic and bureaucratic roles increased, while their physical participation in the defense of the colony decreased. Stories of women's participation in these conflicts were culturally persistent, and nineteenth-century authors employed these accounts to express new identities and agendas. Appearing in both local and regional histories, stories of women's participation in the border wars both reflected and shaped a new ideology of separate spheres while justifying past, present, and future colonization of the continent. In examining women's participation in the wars of the northeastern borderlands, this dissertation complicates commonly held assumptions regarding the roles of women in early modern societies. It also argues that these roles may have been more flexible than previously recognized.
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    I'm Not Yelling
    (2024-04-06) Polikoff, Whalen
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    “Queering Borders”: War, Diaspora, Gender And Sexuality Among Afghans In The United States
    (2019-08) Munhazim, Ahmad Qais
    How did a nation known for a gender-neutral language and celebration of same-sex love through literature and poetry became a masculinist landscape as it learned to live through wars, and how do these wars continue in people’s lives thousands of miles away from their homeland? How was the sense of community and safety created by Afghans who settled in the United States during the political turmoil of the Cold War crushed by the US’s “War on Terror”? How did the lives of Afghans become engulfed by a continuous regime of surveillance that produces unsettling conditions; temporary and fragile homes marked by frequent violence; subjects defined by mistrust, anxieties and fears, and ultimately vigilant masculinities where the surveilled subjects surveil themselves? In this dissertation, I address these and many other entangled questions through stories of people who have lived through multiple wars and displacements, and who have actively refused imposed borders. Through these stories of lived experiences and border crossings, this work asks that we rethink rigid meanings of wars, diasporas and their complex relationships with gender and sexuality, while also complicating the imaginary borders between the researcher and research subjects. My particular contribution is a rich ethnographic study of gendered subjectivities among war diasporas. I argue that it is not possible to adequately understand the norms and performances of gender and sexuality and the profound ways in which they shape the lived experiences of diasporas, without first learning to listen carefully to the nuanced stories of these diasporic communities. These narratives offer complex ways to understand performances of gender and sexuality in the context of war and displacement. Grappling with these stories and narratives of many Afghans in diaspora, I use the pages of this dissertation to queer stable borders of nations, war, peace, gender and sexuality both methodologically and conceptually. Through a critical ethnography of war, diaspora and performances of gender and sexuality, this work strives to become deeply attentive to a wide variation of experiences and differences that accompany people’s lives as they become displaced, as they cross borders, and as they form a diaspora out of these ever-unfolding events and processes. I hope that this dissertation will help to strengthen the foundation for interdisciplinary scholars who are interested in advancing this critical and desperately needed research.
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    Surface to surface: war, image & the senses in the screenic era
    (2013-04) Schrag, Adam
    The dissertation investigates the entanglement of war and media technologies from the 1960s to the present in the context of the Vietnam, Persian Gulf, and Iraq Wars. I develop a concept of `the screenic' to address both the phenomenological and ecological aspects of the screen and other junctures of sensory and technological networks of war.
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    Terrorist Threats: Dreaming Beyond the Violence of Anti-Muslim Racism
    (2020-07) Patel, Soham
    My dissertation draws on cultural and political theory as well as visual arts, literature, and music to examine how Western empire is constructed through Orientalist knowledge and also contested through decolonial, feminist, and anti-racist aesthetics. “Terrorist Threats” relies on a multidimensional approach to studying the Global War on Terror and its attendant figure targeted for death and destruction: the Muslim. Following the scholarship of Sherene H. Razack, Sohail Daulatzai, and Junaid Rana, I examine how the colonial construction of the Muslim as a racialized object within modernity, in particular, has been deployed to taxonomically classify a broad range of intersectional categories: Black, Brown, indigenous, immigrant, Latinx, Arab, Sikh, Hindu, and Islam. That is, the “Muslim” in the context of white supremacy and global imperialism exceeds the rigidity of a faith-based category. In fact, my project contends that the figure of the Muslim becomes a fungible category to signify a racialized object that philosophically and/or phenotypically embodies a political position other than liberal secular humanism. Thus, throughout my project, I explore how several South Asian and Muslim diasporic artists engage in insurgent cultural production to combat white supremacy. This allows me to interrogate how colonial knowledge, on the one hand, propagates anti-Muslim racism and, on the other hand, disciplines, controls, and compels the diaspora to internalize this knowledge as a way to perform the role of the good/desirable immigrant. Throughout “Terrorist Threats,” I highlight how South Asian and Muslim diasporic artists rethink and reshape Orientalist knowledge production and the role of Western secular ideas of self-determination, sovereignty, citizenship, and the Human within colonial modernity. The analysis offers a praxis of reading, seeing, and listening to visual and sonic archives that articulate decolonial knowledge and aesthetics, which becomes what I call “terrorist threats.” My project’s transnational focus seeks to produce decolonial imaginaries whereby different political solidarities and praxes can be forged — beyond and across geopolitical and biopolitical borders.
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    Un homme, un vrai: martial and alternative masculinities in French War literature and film
    (2014-06) Halat, Rebecca
    The corpus of literature and film in this dissertation offers underground versions of masculinities that exist during the high stakes time of war. The analysis of these works set either in war, or during a time and place close to war, brings out the different interpretations, interactions, acceptances and rejections of martial masculinity. While each novel or film is unique in its way of relating to the code of martial masculinity and in re-thinking the heroic warrior myth, my approach to these works provides a way of seeing the broader evolution and adaptation of individuals and their conception of masculinity through the same creative works that question these myths. Through an analysis of masculinities within the varying contexts of war, we see the ways in which such gender requirements function on an institutional and individual level. In emphasizing negotiations with masculinity, we are able to focus on particular gendered aspects of the former romanticization of war and the subsequent entrance into the violent reality of World War I's destruction and World War II's defeat for the French nation.
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    The United Nations Security Council and humanitarian intervention: Causal stories about human rights and war.
    (2008-06) Walling, Carrie Booth
    A dramatic shift in international practice emerged in the 1990s when the United Nations Security Council authorized military humanitarian intervention to stop gross human rights violations. During the Cold War, the Security Council did not halt mass killing and sanctioned states that intervened in sovereign states, despite humanitarian motives or effects. It has responded unevenly to mass killing, however. This dissertation seeks to answer the puzzle of why the Security Council intervenes militarily in defense of human rights in some places but fails to stop ethnic cleansing in others. It traces the emergence of a new norm of humanitarian intervention, the course of its evolution (1991-2004) and the conditions of its use. The dissertation relies on qualitative, comparative case studies: the establishment of no-fly zones in Iraq; three cases of Security Council authorized humanitarian intervention (Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Sierra Leone); and three "non-cases" where humanitarian intervention might have been expected but was not authorized (Rwanda, Kosovo and Darfur, Sudan). There is a connection between the ways that Council Members argue about conflicts and their intervention decisions. For humanitarian intervention to become possible, members of the Security Council, including most of its permanent members, must adopt or accede to a common story about the character of the conflict and its resultant human rights violations-- an intentional causal story with clear victims and identifiable and intentional perpetrators. When significant contestation over competing causal stories occurs, the success of any particular causal story is mediated by: the extent to which humanitarian intervention in that particular case would conflict with or complement the highly internalized norms of state sovereignty and non-intervention; the support of Great Power leadership; and the coherence between causal stories and expert testimony, forensic evidence, and media imagery on the cause and character of the conflict. I conclude that humanitarian intervention does not threaten sovereignty but reformulates it to include citizen protection and the recognition of fundamental human rights. The nascent norm of humanitarian intervention, encapsulated in the responsibility to protect, is gaining international support but has not yet cascaded throughout the international system.