Matching Items (2)
Description
Having registered as a nonprofit organization in Arizona, we are building a community to reconstruct bridges in the Balkan Diaspora by sharing members' stories through interviews called Diaspora Diaries, providing educational resources, and raising funds to support efforts to preserve Balkan culture across the United States through mission-related products. By connecting with members through our online platform, we show that we are one, unified Balkan Diaspora. Implementing an innovative approach to forging a strong Balkan community, we collected 23 Diaspora Diaries from across individual ethnic Diasporas, generations, and backgrounds. By publishing interviews to our site (balkaninamerika.com), we cultivate a deeper appreciation for one another throughout the diasporic community. Diaspora Diaries have sparked enthusiasm in members across the U.S., as interviews have been incredibly positive with individuals sharing personal histories about sustaining their cultural identities. Through using oral histories as our primary mechanism of conflict resolution and community building, we better understand how individuals influence history and are influenced by history.
ContributorsJoksimovic, Megan (Author) / Pesheva, Anna (Co-author) / Brown, Keith (Thesis director) / Parvu, Luiza (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of Marketing (Contributor) / Dean, W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor)
Created2024-05
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