Matching Items (24)
Description
This project assembles incidences of namāz (daily Muslim ritual prayer) offered in jamāt (congregation) by those worshippers who have found themselves marginalized, disciplined, and disoriented from mainstream Muslim ritual life due to their gender or sexual orientation. It follows assays in, and commitments to, a livable Muslim life as it unfolds from the stories of disoriented Muslim worshippers at prayer together. It looks first at the religious life stories of a network of queer Pakistanis contending with the heteropatriarchal and cisgender norms of mainstream Muslim life, in struggle to continue their orientation towards Allāh alongside their own existential reality. It then narrates the last rites of two Pakistani women by describing the circumstances in which their namāz-e-janāza, i.e. their funeral prayers were performed. These funerals are moments and spaces that alter the received understanding of jamāt so that disoriented worshippers who have been made unwelcome in the larger collectivity can reorient towards compassionate convening with each other and with Allāh. The portraits of Muslims convened for prayer that are drawn together here bring into conversation multiple ways of being Muslim and describe an emergent queer Muslim praxis that expands the parameters of what is thinkable in Islam. This narrative ethnography sheds light on how it is that mainstream Pakistani religious life disorients women as well as transgender and queer folks by narrowing the space available to these bodies within the jamāt. Deploying multiple methodological approaches in a number of research sites, this dissertation draws on events and lived experiences of ritual and religious convenings to propose and advance an understanding of the jamāt as both a congregation of worship and a congregation of care. This dissertation is an exploration of the conditions of possibility for livable life for those who are disoriented in the space of Muslim communal gathering—a life that is queer, Muslim, safe from harm, and joyful—arguing that for queer and disoriented Muslims, solidarity and a livable life go hand in hand.
ContributorsPasha, Kyla Pria (Author) / Talebi, Shahla (Thesis advisor) / Haines, Chad (Committee member) / Quan, H. L. T. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
In recent years, privately owned and operated residential programs for troubled youth have been at the forefront of national discussion on institutional child abuse in state-sanctioned carceral facilities. Survivors and their advocates have argued that these programs should be regulated by state agencies and closed because they are harmful to residents and divert resources from effective treatment options. In opposition to the survivor movement stand owners, practitioners, and “tough on crime” politicians, who claim that that state intervention in the Troubled Teen Industry (TTI) would curtail effective treatment options for families, and in the case of faith-based programs, violate their constitutionally protected religious freedoms. Guided by the fields of Mad Studies and Critical Prison Studies, this research offers a political history of the TTI, focused on the faith-based residential facilities of Lester Roloff and Herman Fountain. It also draws on first-person interviews with three survivors of a faith-based bootcamp called Bethel Boys Academy, of the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs to delineate how these survivors make sense of their experiences before, during, and after being held captive. I conclude by arguing that the TTI survivor movement and prison abolitionists should cooperate to dismantle white supremacist political structures and improve access to meaningful treatment options for vulnerable youth.
ContributorsBrown, Andrew Gordon (Author) / Quan, H.L.T. (Thesis advisor) / Gomez, Alan E. (Committee member) / Talebi, Shahla (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Following the 1991 Gulf War, the ruling royal family of Saudi Arabia constrained the religious establishment by remapping the hierarchy of authority in the kingdom legally, conceptually, and historically. Ṣaddām Ḥusayn’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 constituted an unprecedented crisis in Saudi politics which contributed to the religious establishment questioning the political legitimacy of the ruling royal family, Al Saud. The elite religious establishment, or ulamā, publicly challenged the legitimacy of Al Saud’s unchecked authority when they composed the 1991 Letter of Demands. After the war, I suggest that ruling elites set out to change the basis of their political legitimacy by redefining the religiopolitical orthodoxy which governs their relationship with the religious establishment. I propose that the 1992 Basic Law of Governance—the first positive legal charter for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—expands the authority of the King while offering the appearance of constraining the exercise of political authority. In this thesis, I analyze the ways in which the text of the Letter of Demands and the Basic Law of Governance offer disparate visions of orthodox Islamic governance according to the Saudi tradition. I hypothesize that the text of the Letter of Demands, as well as the circumstances surrounding its production, involved a reassertion of authority by the elite religious establishment in religious spaces. I suggest that, in response, the Basic Law of Governance expanded the authority of the King and delivered an alternative vision of Saudi orthoprax governance. I contemplate some of the ways that expanding their authority was part of a larger project undertaken by the royal family after the 1991 Gulf War to redefine Saudi religiopolitical orthodoxy. Finally, I offer a meditation on the idea that the project undertaken by Al Saud to redefine Saudi religiopolitical orthodoxy necessitated reformulating the historical narrative of the kingdom’s origin and policy in the twentieth century. In this thesis, I set out to contemplate the epistemic relationship between sociopolitical inflection and diachronic changes to Islamic concepts. In other words, how do Islamic concepts, and the practices they underlie, change over time and in response to moments of social and political crisis? This is where I imagine my work broadly contributing to Religious Studies as a field. I am interested in historical instances where political authorities instrumentalize cultural forms, including historical narratives and religious discourses, to legitimize their own interests, consolidate power, and maintain hegemony. The instrumentalization of religiocultural discourses in order to articulate new modes of state and subject formation is a vital topic of inquiry. I aspire that my work can contribute to this tertiary dialogue by showcasing one historical instance where religious concepts and historical narratives were instrumentalized to legitimize elite interests, consolidate monopolistic political power, and maintain social, political, and cultural forms of hegemony. My aim is to use these narratives about epistemic violence to trouble the power dynamics that get reproduced in Euro-North American knowledge produced about the Global South.
ContributorsBean, Skyler Allen (Author) / Talebi, Shahla (Thesis advisor) / Liew, Han Hsien (Committee member) / Alhassan, Shamara Wyllie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
This dissertation coheres together over a hundred insurgent testimonies published from within Arizona State Prison Complex – Perryville, the state’s only prison for women. These testimonies tell a people’s history of Arizona’s largest and most public legal intervention for prisoners’ rights: Parsons v. Ryan. In 2009, after Perryville correctional officers left Marcia Powell to bake to death in the Arizona summer sun, prisoners lit their mattresses on fire to proclaim that their lives were in danger, sparking a wave of resistance, including outside from family members and advocates, which prompted a class action lawsuit against the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Re-Entry (ADCRR). After years of prisoners’ calls for a systemic reckoning of the death-producing state punishment system, legal intervention distilled their suffering and demands into a set of discrete allegations. Meanwhile, settlement stipulations continue to implore ADCRR to meet minimum constitutional standards. While the accountability Parsons v. Ryan seeks is limited to the administration of medical care and extreme isolation, testimonies in this people’s history reveal a breadth of systemic violences that encompass and surpass the legal claims. These testimonies, which evidence strategies of care work, protest, and covert documentation, delineate the prison’s function to degrade human dignity and inflict physical and psychological harm in virtually every area of basic survival, including access to food, shelter, hygiene, and personal safety. Through use of the “rebel archive,” the resulting narrative, made possible by virtue of prisoners’ organizing for dignity, invokes a critical analysis of the sublimation of their resistance and demands for a project of liberal carceral care as prison reform.
ContributorsCooper, Ashley Ann (Author) / Quan, H.L.T. (Thesis advisor) / Swadener, Elizabeth B (Committee member) / Talebi, Shahla (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
The concept of Velayat-e Faqih as a type of Shi’ite Islamic government gained popularity three decades ago, after the Islamic revolution in Iran. The new constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran was based on Velayat-e Fagih, proposed by the Imam Khomeini many consider him as the leader of the Islamic Revolution and the founder of the Iranian Islamic Republic. What is Velayat-e Faqih? Who can be the Vali Faqih? Why wasn't this idea proposed before Islamic Revolution in 1979? Did all the Shi’ite religious scholars endorse this idea or the Vali Faqih himself? All of these questions ultimately lead us to ask whether this concept has been drawn from Shi’ite Islamic discourses or it may perhaps be considered a novelty: a secularization of religion. These questions are increasingly discussed in academia and in the large public arena. Moreover, this discourse has divided Shi’ite Muslims into three groups: supporters of the Velayat-e Faqih, its opponents, and the silent group. It is important to analyze the position of all those groups including the silent group who did not publicly endorse or reject the theory. The theory of Velayat-e Faqih has emerged from the Imamate doctrine, which constitutes a cornerstone of Shi'ite sect of Islam. It is necessary to understand this political doctrine in relation to the context within which this concept of leadership had emerged. In order to overcome the ambiguities surrounding the relationship between Velayat-e Faqih and the position of Islamic jurist as a source of guidance and imitation (Marje Taqleed), it is necessary to discuss the various dimension of guardianship in the absence of the infallible Imam. Furthermore, the focus of this research is to review whether the concept of Velayat-e Faqih was innovated after the Islamic Revolution of Iran or existed within the Shi’ite tradition.
ContributorsRezai, Ali Siyar (Author) / Gallab, Abdullahi (Thesis advisor) / Talebi, Shahla (Committee member) / Gereboff, Joel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The concept of recognition developed through the 20th century as a form of political legitimation has served a central if problematic role in understanding international politics. On the one hand, recognition aims toward establishing essential collective identities that must be conceived as relatively stable in order to then gain respect, receive political protection, and occupy both physical and discursive space. On the other hand, recognition tacitly accepts a social constructivist view of the subject who can only become whole unto itself – and in turn exercise positive liberty, freedom, or agency – through the implied assent or explicit consent of another. There is an inherent tension between these two understandings of recognition. The attempt to reconcile this tension often manifests itself in forms of symbolic and systemic violence that can turn to corporeal harm. In order to enter into the concept, history, politics and performativity of recognition, I focus on what is often viewed as an exceptionally complex and uniquely controversial case: the Israel-Palestine conflict. Undergoing a discourse analysis of three epistemic communities (i.e., the State/diplomatic network, the Academic/intellectual network, the Military-Security network) and their unique modes of veridiction, I show how each works to construct the notion of ethno-nationalism as a necessary political logic that holds the promise of everything put in its right place: Us here, Them there. All three epistemic communities are read as knowledge/power networks that have substantial effect on political subjects and subjectivities. Influenced by the philosophy of Hegel and Levinas, and supported by the works of Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown, Alphonso Lingis, Jacques Derrida, Patchen Markell, and others, I show the ways in which our current politics of recognition is best read as violence. By tracing three discursive networks of knowledge/power implicated in our modern politics of recognition, I demonstrate forms of symbolic violence waged against the entire complex of the Israel-Palestine conflict in ways that preclude a just resolution based on mutual empathy, acknowledgment, and (re)cogntion.
ContributorsBar, Eyal (Author) / Doty, Roxanne L (Thesis advisor) / Ashley, Richard K. (Thesis advisor) / Walker, Stephen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This dissertation examines automobile title lending practices to interrogate debt as an embodied experience. Alternative financial services such as title lending provide a way to link socio-economic inequality to instruments of financial debt. The predominant research on inequality focuses on wage, income, and asset wealth; rarely is a direct connection made between socio-economic inequality and the object of debt. My interest lies beyond aggregate amounts of debt to also consider the ways in which different bodies have access to different forms of debt. This project examines how particular subprime instruments work to reinforce structural inequalities associated with race, class, and gender and how specific populations are increasingly coming to rely on debt to subsist. Using in-depth interviews, geospatial mapping, and descriptive statistical analysis I show the importance of recognizing debt not only as a conditional object but also as a lived condition of being. I conclude with discussions on dispossession and financial precarity to consider how the normative discourse of debt needs to change.
ContributorsSugata, Michihiro (Author) / Quan, H.L.T. (Thesis advisor) / Talebi, Shahla (Committee member) / Catlaw, Thomas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Naming and naming practices take place at various sites associated with international politics. These sites include border crossings, migrations, diasporas, town halls, and offices of political parties representing minorities. This project is an investigation of these and other sites. It takes seriously questions of names and naming practices and particularly asks how people participate in these practices, often doing so with states and state authorities. It not only looks at and discusses how people proceed in these practices but also assesses the implications for people regarding how and when they can be at home as well as how and where they can move. Through an ethnography of Aegean Macedonians involving interviews, participant observation, and archival research, I find that naming practices occur well beyond the sites where they are expected. Names themselves are the result of negotiation and are controlled neither by their bearers nor those who would name. Similarity of demonyms with toponyms, do not ensure that bearers of such demonyms will be at home in the place that shares there name. Changes in names significance of names occur rapidly and these names turn home into abroad and hosts into guests.
ContributorsPout, Daniel (Author) / Doty, Roxanne L (Thesis advisor) / Ashley, Richard K. (Committee member) / Hjorleifur Jonsson (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Guantánamo: The Amen Temple of Empire connects the fetishization of the trauma of nine/eleven with the co-constitution of subjects at Guantánamo—that of the contained Muslim terrorist prisoner silhouetted against the ideal nationalistic military body—circulated as ‘afterimages’ that carry ideological narratives about U.S. Empire. These narratives in turn religiously and racially charge the new normative practices of the security state and its historically haunted symbolic order. As individuals with complex subjectivities, the prisoners and guards are, of course, not reducible to the standardizing imprimatur of the state or its narratives. Despite the circulation of these ‘afterimages’ as fixed currency, the prisoners and guards produce their own metanarratives, through their para-ethnographic accounts of containment and of self. From within the panopticon of the prison, they seek sight lines, and gaze back at the state. This dissertation is thus a meditation on US militarism, violence, torture, race, and carceral practices, revealed thematically through metaphors of hungry ghosts, nature, journey and death, liminality, time, space, community, and salvage. Based on a multi-sited, empirical and imaginary ethnography, as well as textual and discourse analysis, I draw on the writing and testimony of prisoners, and military and intelligence personnel, whom I consider insightful para-ethnographers of the haunting valence of this fetishized historical event.
ContributorsColeman, Diana (Diana Murtaugh) (Author) / Talebi, Shahla (Thesis advisor) / Matustik, Martin (Committee member) / Fessenden, Tracy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
The traditional site of Rachel's Tomb is located just south of Jerusalem on the border of Bethlehem. In recent years, Rachel's Tomb architectural appearance and cultural significance have shifted dramatically in the last two decades and the Biblical figure of Rachel has evolved in the Jewish imagination as a figure "emplaced" there as well. The original stories that have drawn visitors to the site have developed from Biblical and Rabbinic texts, yet contemporary visitors to the site have their own perspectives and stories to tell, grounded in religious tradition, nostalgia, and current political and social realities. At the traditional site of her tomb, Rachel has served for at least the last century as something like a "patron saint" for Jewish women's domestic issues, but her intercessory abilities have recently been expanded. Her special relationship to Zionism through her connections to the Biblical notions of Jewish "return" and end-times "redemption" have been recast to fit contemporary political viewpoints and contestations. In addition, she has developed into a kind of national "mater dolorosa," representing the collective grief for deaths through acts of political violence, particularly women's deaths. This project traces the ways in which current narrative and praxis at the traditional site of Rachel's Tomb have developed as well as the ways in which current perceptions of the site-and Rachel as the cultural figure associated with the space-draw upon temporally-situated interpretations of her textual tradition, as well as affective discourse and collective cultural memory.
ContributorsAnderson, Carli (Author) / Gereboff, Joel (Thesis advisor) / Mirguet, Francoise (Committee member) / Talebi, Shahla (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019