The Visual Divide Islam Vs. The West, Image Peception In Cross-cultural Contexts

Do two people, coming from different cultural backgrounds, see the same image the same way? Do we employ technologies of seeing that embed visuality within relentless cultural and ideological frames? And, if so, when does visual difference become a tool for inclusion and exclusion? When does it become an instrument of war? I argue that we‘re always implicated in visuality as a form of confirmation bias, and that what we see is shaped by preexisting socioideological frames that can only be liberated through an active and critical relationship with the image. The image itself, albeit ubiquitous, is never unimplicated - at once violated and violating; with both its creator and its perceiver self-positioned as its ultimate subject. I follow a trace of the image within the context of a supposed Islam versus the West dichotomy; its construction, instrumentalization, betrayals, and incriminations. This trace sometimes forks into multiple paths, and at times loops unto itself, but eventually moves towards a traversal of a visual divide. I apply the trace as my methodology in the sense suggested by Derrida, but also as a technology for finding my way into and out of an epistemological labyrinth. The Visual Divide comprises five chapters: Chapter One presents some of the major themes of this work while attempting a theoretical account of image perception within philosophical and cross-cultural settings. I use this account to understand and undermine contemporary rhetoric (as in the works of Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis) that seems intent on theorizing a supposed cultural and historical dichotomies between Islam and the West. In Chapter Two, I account for slogan chants heard at Tahrir Square during the January 25 Egyptian revolution as tools to discovering a mix of technology, language and revolution that could be characterized as hybrid, plural and present at the center of which lies the human body as subject to public peril. Chapter Three analyzes a state of visual divide where photographic evidence is posited against ethnographic reality as found in postcards of nude and semi-nude Algerian Muslim women in the 19th century. I connect this state to a chain of visual oppositions that place Western superiority as its subject and which continues to our present day with the Abu Ghraib photographs and the Mohammed cartoons, etc. Chapter Four deploys the image of Mohamed al-Durra, a 3rd grader who was shot dead, on video, at a crossroads in Gaza, and the ensuing attempts to reinterpret, recreate, falsify and litigate the meaning of the video images of his death in order to propagate certain political doxa. I relate the violence against the image, by the image, and despite the image, to a state of pure war that is steeped in visuality, and which transforms the act of seeing into an act of targeting. In Chapter Five, I integrate the concept of visuality with that of the human body under peril in order to identify conditions that lead to comparative suffering or a division that views humanity as something other than unitary and of equal value. I connect the figures of der Muselmann, Shylock, Othello, the suicide bomber, and others to subvert a narrative that claims that one‘s suffering is deeper than another‘s, or that life could be valued differently depending on the place of your birth, the color of your skin, or the thickness of your accent. v Finally, in the Epilogue: Tabbouleh Deterritorialized, I look at the interconnected states of perception and remembering within diasporic contexts. Cultural identity (invoked by an encounter with tabbouleh on a restaurant menu in Orlando) is both questioned and transformed and becomes the subject of perception and negotiation

In Better Fettle: Improvement, Work and Rhetoric in the Transition to Environmental Farming in the North York Moors

Through ethnographic research amongst farmers in the North York Moors, and through broader historical and political analysis, I examine the importance and role of values in hard work and beneficent change in negotiated interactions between policy-makers, farmers and conservationists. Within the context of a shift in agricultural support away from production to environmental protection, and within the context of a local conservation initiative to protect a population of freshwater pearl mussels in the River Esk, I show the importance of these values for the construction of farmers' personhoods and their symbolic relations and means of expression through the landscape. I show how those values are persistent and pervasive, yet at the same time mutable and open to interpretation. In particular, I examine alternative conceptions of beneficent change through recourse to the words fettle and improvement. Fettling places value in long-term, steady and incremental change, whereas improvement places value in changes more closely associated with productivist ideals such as expansion and profit. I suggest that it is the mutability of farming values that gives rise to their persistence as they come to be used and reinterpreted according to the changing contexts of their application and the differing interests of a range of groups and individuals. By showing that farmers are able to uphold and express their values differently I argue that it is not so straightforward to predict farmers' responses to changing political exigencies or local conservation initiatives on the basis of homogenous values or the categorisation of farmers into defined "types". Through a rhetoric-culture approach I argue that changes in farming values through time do not merely reflect changing political interests and farmers' subsequent accommodation of them. Rather, it reflects the continued negotiation of those values between farmers and others in the play of agents and patients in the construction of personhood and the formulation of arguments. I argue that the persistence of fettling interpretations of a value in beneficent change reflects the agentive actions of farmers as it remains a useful argumentative strategy with which they can make indictments against new policy impositions and, moreover, it remains functional in guiding their practices in ways suitable to the environment in which they farm

Typographic emphasis and contrastive focus: an eye tracking study

Two eye tracking experiments investigated whether italicising contrastively focused words facilitates processing. In speech, pitch accents can mark focus, signalling that there exist alternatives to the marked element which are relevant to interpreting the expression. In writing, typographic emphasis (italics, bold, etc.) can be used in a similar manner, particularly to mark contrastive focus (asterisks delimit italicisation here): ‘We expected Mark to bring *Mary* to dinner. However, when he arrived, he was with *Ellen*.’ Previous studies have shown that processing is facilitated by congruent marking of information structure with pitch accents, and impeded by incongruent marking. This study sought similar effects for typographic emphasis. Eye movements of participants were tracked as they read short texts (dialogues in Experiment 1, narratives in Experiment 2) in which a contrastively focused target word was italicised, or not. Experiment 2 also manipulated contrast on the target word. To the author’s knowledge, this is the first eye tracking study that investigates the interaction of these factors within continuous text. Incongruence, where a non-contrastive word was typographically emphasised, or a contrastive word was not emphasised, was predicted to cause processing difficulty manifesting as re-reading. Results did not suggest that incongruence had a processing cost, although some effects were found, including (amongst more subtle effects) longer overall fixations on target words, and higher likelihoods of them being fixated at all. These results are discussed from several perspectives, including a ‘zero-impact’ account, which holds there to be no linguistic effect of typographic emphasis, and a more probable ‘effects elsewhere’ account, which suggests the type of re-reading examined here may not have been the correct place to look. The possibility that the visual contrast inherent in typographic emphasis may simply ‘catch the eye’ rather than have a linguistic effect is also investigated, and assessed as being unlikely

Non-Standard Bird Names in England, Bavaria and Austria: A Diachronic Comparative Study

A rich contrastive analysis of more than 3000 non-standard bird names based on extensive archival research and the results of a substantial innovative online survey conducted in 2017 with more than 1100 participants from England, Bavaria and Austria. This volume contains insights into morphological, etymological and semantic aspects of a nearly extinct word field and its colourful history, complemented by synchronic aspects of perceptual dialectology

Nekrolog jako gatunek tekstu : analiza wydania internetowego The New York Times

The thesis presents an analysis of the death notice as a genre, which has been conducted by applying the research models of genre analysis designed by John Swales and Vijay K. Bhatia, and taxonomy of Polish death notices by Jacek Kolbuszewski. This in-depth structural analysis is based on a large corpus of texts (1843 texts consisting of 210,021 words), containing all death notices published in the online edition of The New York Times in a threemonth period (October 1st, 2012 – December 31st, 2012), and downloaded from Legacy.com (the leading global provider of online obituaries and death notices). The analysis involves identifying subgenres of the death notice and their communicative purposes, applying the Move and Steps analytical model to investigate the macrostructure of each subgenre of the death notice and its variants, and carrying out a register analysis, based on lexical and syntactic study with the aim of discovering patterns and lexemes characteristic of each move and/or step. Contrary to the well-researched staff-edited obituary, the genre of American death notice, written by non-professional authors (e.g. relatives, friends, employers or colleagues of the deceased) has not been thoroughly investigated; therefore, it is believed that the thesis will not only make a valuable contribution to the understanding of the genre in question, but it can be used as a reference manual helping prospective writers create a death notice in accordance with the American traditions and rules of the genre. The thesis consists of a theoretical part (Chapters One to Four) and a research part (Chapters Five to Eight). Chapter One revolves around the concepts of discourse, text and genre, and presents an overview of their theories. Chapter Two investigates the American discourse of death; it concentrates on the issue of death as a language taboo and various ways of coping with it, and provides a historical overview of numerous genres commemorating the dead. Chapter Three focuses on the both genres in question; it outlines their origin and evolution in the early British press, and summarizes contemporary research into them. Chapter Four introduces the research part as it discusses the corpus and principles of its division into subcorpora, the research model and applied methodology, and presents the discourse community and communicative purposes. Each of the four chapters constituting the research part deals with the Move and Step analysis of one of four subgenres of the death notice: informative (Chapter Five), farewell (Chapter Six), condolence (Chapter Seven), and anniversary (Chapter Eight); their lexico-structural analysis is illustrated with numerous excerpts from the respective sub-corpora. The Conclusion summarizes the research, and provides implications for future projects. The research has shown that the death notice is a highly conventionalized genre, deeply rooted in American culture and funeral tradition. While presenting biographies of the deceased (always in a positive way, according to the classical rule de mortuis nihil nisi bene), the American death notice emphasizes those specific periods and aspects of their lives (education, professional, political or military career, private life), accomplishments and traits that are valued and respected, and should be imitated by other members of the community. A notice usually contains a lengthy hierarchical list of relatives, both the predeceased and survivors. Each subgenre can be characterized by a specific set of communicative purposes, which are accomplished by a sequence of moves and steps. The commonest subgenre, the informative notice, continues the oldest traditions of the genre by informing the community about a person’s death (optionally its circumstances) and the date and place of the funeral and other services. The style and content of the farewell notice and the condolence notice depend on authorship: highly conventionalized formal institutional notices contrast with more original and intimate private ones. Their authors, whether representatives of an institution or relatives, friends, colleagues, etc., express their loss and grief, praise lives and deeds of the deceased, emphasize their importance for the authors or institution, and, in the case of the condolence notice, they offer their sympathy. The anniversary notice, the rarest subgenre, commemorates the anniversary of decedent’s birth or death, and frequently reminds the community about never-ending love and remembrance of its authors. A significant number of farewell and anniversary notices are addressed to the deceased themselves, the ‘virtual readers,’ which affects their structure and style. The register analysis displays a high level of intertextuality: non-professional obituarists tend to use conventional and stereotypical lexicon, phrases and structures, or even templates (they may copy or imitate other texts and study models provided in obituary manuals). There is no substantial evidence that the Internet has affected the genre: only few texts include hyperlinks that direct to the memorial sites at Legacy.com, where particular groups of the dead are commemorated (e.g. war veterans, university graduates, breast cancer victims)