Constructing Evil: U.S. Media Discourse and the Iranian State Murder of Neda Agha-Soltan

On June 20, 2009, one image became not only a symbol of unbridled state violence, but a rallying cry for a movement contesting the disputed election of hardline Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The particular image in question was of Neda Agha-Soltan, a 26 year old woman whose murder was recorded by cellphone camera during a political protest and subsequently posted to social media networks showing a graphic fist-hand account of the savagery of a state crime. Media discourse presented the idea that Neda\u27s murder was committed by the Iranian government unafraid to implore repressive measures to control its population. The question posed in this analysis is how did media discourse frame her murder, and what were the consequences. In studying media discourse surrounding the event, I focused on how Neda\u27s murder was constructed in the New York Times and Washington Post from June 23, 2009 to June 30, 2009. However, this construction was framed through Orientalism, which created a dichotomy between good and bad Muslims. This dichotomy was found to situate the protesters as good Muslims, while portraying President Ahmadinejad and the Iranian government as bad . Within a framing of good\u27 Muslim and bad Muslim, the United States elite media discourse represented an image of the Iranian government as evil, childlike, and violent, while portraying the protesters as innocent, repressed, and seeking protection. Elite discourse would shape the video of Neda Agha Soltan\u27s murder as an instrument that could help justify deploying more military force into the Middle East

Killing The State: The Cultural Afterlife of Edward Byrne

The death of a police officer provides us a chance to understand our current histories. As something tragic, the bodies of officers killed in the line-of-duty gain national attention. On display at police funerals is the enormous power of the state, as thousands of officers escort the casket, while helicopters and SWAT, accompanies the body to its final resting place. Following the officer’s death is a nation’s grief. As bills are passed in their honor, and weeks are named for those lost, the nation responds to such acts with general anger and disbelief. The killing of a police officer, generally, comes as a surprise, shocking an apathetic population into a groundswell of rage and anger at those held responsible. Engaging the political power of death, this dissertation analyzes the deaths of police officers as defining, and spectacular, events for the state. Focusing on the death of a New York City Police Officer Edward Byrne, killed in 1988 at the height of the “crack epidemic”, the aim here is to show how a police officer’s death reveals the unequal politics of death in the contemporary US. An unequal nature that is, in fact, understood by the hierarchical status of life as defined by the state. Furthermore, I look towards a thanatopolitics, a politics of death, to understand the ways in which Byrne’s death operated as a productive power for the state while subjecting marginalized communities and peoples of color to police power’s tactics of pulverization. The first of two substantive chapters draws on the narrative of Byrne’s death, as one “occupying a chilling and solitary niche”, that made possible a thanatopolitics that supported new tactics of police power in New York City. It is within these new tactics and the continued remembrance of Byrne’s death that makes the justifications of the killing of marginalized people, like Sean Bell, possible. The second chapter connects the federal grants named after Byrne, the Edward Byrne Memorial Assistance Grants, to the use of SWAT raids and no-knocks as a means of rationalizing thanatopolitics as techniques of pulverization. Ultimately it is argued, that Byrne’s death and likewise other similar deaths, mobilize the state’s power and reaffirms its violence as necessary

Testing Infection Graphs

We study the following problem: given two graphs G_0 and G_1 defined on a common set of n vertices and a single observation of the statuses of these vertices, i.e. either infected, uninfected, or censored, did the infection spread on G_0 or G_1? Modern instances of such ``infections\u27\u27 include diseases such as HIV, behaviors such as smoking, or information such as online news articles. For particular stochastic spreading mechanisms, we give algorithms for this testing problem based on hypothesis discretization and permutation-invariance. Additionally, these methods also lead to confidence sets for parameters that also govern the spread of infection and for the graphs on which the infection spread

Towards a dynamic model of IT innovation in organisations.

The aim of the project is to design and build a digital portal which will document, organise, and preserve aspects of Balinese cultural heritage and related knowledge for the benefit of the wider community and the younger generations in particular. We present the details of our research dealing with one aspect of Balinese culture, the Balinese traditional communication system (kulkul), undertaken in the Indonesian island of Bali. This knowledge is held largely in the tacit form in the Balinese community and tends to be poorly documented and fragmented. A basic ontology of key kulkul-related concepts and terms and their interrelationships was developed to support the semantic searching and browsing of the online portal and related resources. Much of the content for the portal was acquired through community-based crowdsourcing. We also discuss the procedures employed to test and evaluate the digital portal prototype

Extending understanding of IT innovation using innovation theory as an organising framework for future research

Information technology innovation has been predominately examined from a diffusion and adoption perspective. Whilst this research is important, the existing body of knowledge concerning the developing, implementation and use of information technology potentially ignores key dimensions of innovation theory found within the innovation literature. This paper extends the idea of utilising an innovation perspective to consolidate definitions and understating of information technology innovation. It presents an initial methodological approach to address important dimensions of innovation theory and illustrates the potential of this approach with preliminary data from a case study involving IT innovation practice

Reimagining Knowledge as Gardening: Planting Seeds of Knowledge and Imagining Future Blossoms

Within a Western research paradigm, knowledge translation is often approached in a predictably linear fashion, as evidenced in research manuscripts with delineated sections (e.g., background, methods, findings and implications). This approach to knowledge sharing is oftentimes one-directional and involves the researcher ‘telling’ the audience what knowledge was gained. This prescriptive framework may not be culturally relevant or appropriate for Indigenous researchers or research contexts. In this presentation, Reid and Turner shared how they are approaching knowledge translation differently, through the lens of their own identities and intersections - some of which the co-presenters share (both are occupational therapists, citizens of Métis Nation BC, current PhD students in UBC’s Rehabilitation Sciences Graduate Program, and identify on the queer spectrum) and some of which are different. Rather than approaching knowledge as something to be translated, the two approach it as a knowledge gardening process.  As the co-authors come into relationship with ideas and teachings that are planted (learned), knowledge blooms and can be shared with others in a range of ways. For Reid and Turner, this may look like creatively sharing joy-based perspectives that are informative, relevant and which spark audience imagination and relatability. Within an Indigenous framework of relationality, knowledge gardening can be a means of honoring one's own relationship to ideas while also bringing listeners into relationship with knowledge that bloomed throughout the research journey. This presentation left the audience with a re-imagining of what knowledge translation, or gardening, could grow into in their own work

The Gun Subsidy

Despite thousands of gun deaths annually, the United States has failed to reach consensus on any means of addressing the public health crisis that is gun violence. The issue has become politically polarized, constitutionalized, and an object of pessimism and despair. We propose a regulatory system in which gun manufacturers would be strictly liable to a federal fund for deaths caused by their guns, paired with a subsidy that will serve to ensure the availability of guns sufficient to meet the rights the Supreme Court has found in the Second Amendment. While strict liability of this kind can indeed serve its traditional purposes of spreading costs and incentivizing better designs and processes, our primary goal is to alter the political economy around the issue of gun violence more generally. If manufacturers bear an increasing share of the costs created by their products, they will endeavor not only to produce products and advertise them in ways likely to reduce those costs but also to advocate for regulations that may do the same. While our proposal may not depolarize the issue entirely, it at least attempts to focus the minds and experience of those who know guns best on effective means of reducing guns’ social costs