Between Sumud and Submission : Palestinian Popular Practices on the Land in the Edge Areas of Jerusalem

This thesis delves into two ‘edge areas’ located in and around East Jerusalem. It attempts to unfold and analyze the dynamics in these edge areas, while investigating the agency of the people present there through their own perceptions and practices towards the land, the urbanization processes, the power circulation and the structural impositions. Squeezed by a settler-colonial domination that continuously encroaches further on their lives, the Palestinians, in return, seek to carve out a space for their own enduring presence on the land. That pursuit combines elements of sumud (steadfastness) and adaptation, tenacity and accommodation, actions that sometimes subvert the occupation and some other times submit to its logic. The thesis traces the contradiction between a proliferating ethos of individual enrichment and the remaining collective culture of political struggle. It also scrutinizes the ways that Palestinians move between those poles as always conditioned by the pressure from the overarching structure of settler-colonial domination. Furthermore, the thesis examines how certain structural patterns are unconsciously reproduced by the agents of these specific areas, even when their intention and desire could be to resist them. The thesis argues that East Jerusalem should be approached from the theory of settler-colonial hegemony. Thus, these areas are the by-products of the settler-colonial domination present in East Jerusalem, intentionally assembled by the Israeli authorities as“containers” that collect undesired Palestinian Jerusalemites, while leaving them trapped in a state of permanent temporariness. This situation has developed gradually through the construction of the separation wall, so as to further enhance the systematic displacement of the Palestinian Jerusalemites and achieve the Judaization of Jerusalem. The thesis claims that acts of resistance and accommodation of certain colonial practices have the inclination to collide and interact with each other, and hence obfuscate the demarcation between them. This dynamic has been unpacked through coining the concept ‘enclosures from below’. The thesis aims to contribute to scholarship on Palestine and provide a detailed analysis that could feed into awider analysis of the dynamics of settler-colonialism, as well as inform Palestinian strategies in the ongoing struggle for liberation

Gender Selection: A Position Statement

Gender selection is the ability to choose a girl or a boy before you get pregnant. Some methods are used to assist in changing the odds towards the gender being selected. Methods such as selective abortion and infanticide resulted in birth ratios as high as 130 males per 100 females in some countries. Gender selection is surrounded with many debates. The purpose of this position statement is to present opponents and proponents’ viewpoints regarding gender selection. More to be done in this regard such as: the decisiveness of couples and physicians in issues related to gender selection; centers providing gender selection must keep a balanced gender ratio within the center; gender selection should only be done after proper informative and implicative counseling about many issues such as how to use healthy embryos of the unwanted gender in research, or their donation to infertile couples, or their transfer to the genetic mother. Keywords: gender selection, position statement, proponents, opponent

The Effect of Psychological Stress on Alienation Levels among Sultan Qaboos University Students

The study aimed to examine the predictive effects of educational and health stress on Sultan Qaboos University's (SQU) students' feeling of alienation. In addition, the study examined the effects of demographic variables (gender, GPA) on the levels of alienation. The study sample consisted of 482 students (69.3%) females from both undergraduate and postgraduate levels at SQU. Two questionnaires were used. The first one measured the levels of alienation based on four domains: loss of belonging, non-compliance with standards, feeling of disability, and loss of meaning. The second one measured the levels of educational and health stress. The study results revealed that the rates of alienation and stress were generally low. Moreover, statistically significant differences were found in the domain of non-compliance with standards based on gender. Also, statistically significant differences were found in all alienation domains based on GPA. The results indicated that educational stress was able to predict all domains of alienation; however, health stress was able to predict the "loss of meaning" domain only. The researchers provided a number of recommendations to deal with feelings of alienation among students.   

Developing and Testing Visual Privacy Metrics

The dense redevelopment of inner cities (intensification) has been accompanied by a dramatic surge in the development of multi-unit residential buildings (MURBs) within ever shrinking proximities to one another. Modern multi-unit residential building design often embodies conflicting desires for daylighting and visual privacy, or designers simply do not consider collective occupant discomfort factors. Thus, the focus of this project was to develop and validate conceptual and quantitative variables influencing visual privacy, such that future and existing residential designs can be analyzed from a visual privacy perspective. This paper formulates an approach that combines building physics (visual angles and relative brightness) with social and psychological factors to avoid conflicts between competing aspirations for sustainable and resilient buildings that promote occupant wellbeing

UB Online Courses: An On-Demand Video-Streaming Service for Online Education

Online education in the past few years has become a very convenient and cost-effective alternative to the traditional class-based education offered on college and university campuses. Its popularity can been seen in the increasing number of online courses being offered by many universities around the world; and the University of Bridgeport is no exception. To handle the increasing demand on online education programs, the current methods and technologies need to be improved to meet the student expectations of ease of use, accessibility and availability. In this work we’re addressing issues in the current online education services provided at UB, such as the standardization of video formats, making the lecture videos viewable on smart phone devices, and making all courses available in a central location

Towards QoE-Driven Optimization of Multi-Dimensional Content Streaming

Whereas adaptive video streaming for 2D video is well established and frequently used in streaming services, adaptation for emerging higher-dimensional content, such as point clouds, is still a research issue. Moreover, how to optimize resource usage in streaming services that support multiple content types of different dimensions and levels of interactivity has so far not been sufficiently studied. Learning-based approaches aim to optimize the streaming experience according to user needs. They predict quality metrics and try to find system parameters maximizing them given the current network conditions. With this paper, we show how to approach content and network adaption driven by Quality of Experience (QoE) for multi-dimensional content. We describe components required to create a system adapting multiple streams of different content types simultaneously, identify research gaps and propose potential next steps

‘A forest of urbanization’: Camp Metropolis in the edge areas

This article examines two issues located at the core of thePalestinian struggle: Jerusalem and the refugee camps. I aim totrace the forced encounter staged at these two crucial sites ofcontestation, while looking at the collisions/interactions that occurbetween them, and the types of geographies that are producedwithin an experience of abandonment. This is done by exploringhow the colonized re-produce their own spaces after beingsystematically displaced either as refugees in 1948 or asJerusalemites due to the ongoing ‘Judaization’ of Jerusalem –particularly following the construction of the Separation Wall – inplaces that are forced to become edge areas. The article focuseson the period following the Oslo Accords and the establishmentof the Palestinian Authority (PA) – a period characterized by theintroduction of neoliberalism and the acceptance of an urbanapartheid. In this article, I will show the central role of themarginalized refugee camps in how they have contributed to thefrenetic urbanization that is serving the displaced PalestinianJerusalemites. In these edge areas, the camp has re-adjusted itsposition and shifted from being at the fringes of the city to thecenter of the edge areas; it has become what I call a ‘CampMetropolis’. This article investigates two case studies: Kufr Aqab/Qalandia and Shu’faat areas