Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniella Talmon-Heller
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Sacred Places ◽  
Sacred Place ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
Mamluk Period

Focusing on the construction of sanctity and its manifestations in individual devotions, formal ceremonies and communal rites, this book offers a fresh perspective on religious culture in the medieval Middle East. It investigates Islamic thinking about and practice in sacred places and times through the detailed research of two contested case-studies: the shrine(s) in honour of the head of al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAli, and the (arguably) holy month of Rajab. The narrative spans the formative period of Islam until the late Mamluk period, attuned to changing political contexts and sectarian affiliations, and to the input of the social sciences and the study of religion. The juxtaposition of sacred place and time reveals that the two expanses were regarded as complementary venues for similar religious devotions, and imagined by a common vocabulary.

The Use of Photo-interviewing: Three Examples from Health Evaluation and Research

2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 52-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosalind Hurworth ◽  
Eileen Clark ◽  
Jenepher Martin ◽  
Steve Thomsen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Recent Case ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Health Evaluation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social

This article reviews the use of photographs as data within the social sciences as well as defining related terminology used over the past century. It then examines the use of photos as stimuli for talking about health settings before presenting three recent case studies where photo-interviewing has been used successfully in health evaluation and research. Advantages and limitations of the method are considered.

Situating Tribes in History: Lessons from the Archives and the Social Sciences

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-476
Author(s):  
Nadav Samin
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Know How ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Official Records

The tribe presents a problem for the historian of the modern Middle East, particularly one interested in personalities, subtleties of culture and society, and other such “useless” things. By and large, tribes did not leave their own written records. The tribal author is a phenomenon of the present or the recent past. There are few twentieth century tribal figures comparable to the urban personalities to whose writings and influence we owe our understanding of the social, intellectual, and political history of the modern Middle East. There is next a larger problem of record keeping to contend with: the almost complete inaccessibility of official records on the postcolonial Middle East. It is no wonder that political scientists and anthropologists are among the best regarded custodians of the region's twentieth century history; they know how to make creative and often eloquent use of drastically limited tools. For many decades, suspicious governments have inhibited historians from carrying out the duties of their vocation. This is one reason why the many rich and original new monographs on Saddam Hussein's Iraq are so important. If tribes are on the margins of the records, and the records themselves are off limits, then one might imagine why modern Middle Eastern tribes are so poorly conceived in the scholarly imagination.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-316
Author(s):  
Rabab El-Mahdi ◽  
Ellen Lust
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Arab Uprisings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Procedural Outcomes

The nation-state is in crisis. The increasing mobility of capital and information, unprecedented waves of people moving across borders, and rise of actors, such as ISIS, unwilling to abide by the rules of the Westphalian system, challenge the very notion of territoriality, citizenship, sovereignty, and the state's monopoly over the legitimate use of force. Studies on the Middle East and North Africa since the Arab uprisings took the region by storm, upending “conventional wisdom” held by many political scientists and scholars, have focused largely on the causes, genealogy, and procedural outcomes of the events. These are important, but as we shall see, the uprisings also highlighted the need to think carefully about how the modern state has changed, is being adapted, or has been superseded. How is the “state,” a foundational conceptual construct in the social sciences, to be located in light of these events? And to what extent do the concepts we employ and the language we use accurately reflect and allow us to interrogate realities, or do they obscure them? This roundtable aims to spark this much-needed discussion.

scholarly journals Multi-Method Research in the Social Sciences: A Review of Recent Frameworks and a Way Forward

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Beach
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Causal Effects ◽  
Large Set ◽  
Causal Process ◽  
Top Down ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Case Based

AbstractThis article reviews recent attempts to develop multi-method social scientific frameworks. The article starts by discussing the ontological and epistemological foundations underlying case studies and variance-based approaches, differentiating approaches into bottom-up, case-based and top-down, variance-based approaches. Case-based approaches aim to learn how a causal process works within a case, whereas variance-based approaches assess mean causal effects across a set of cases. However, because of the different fundamental assumptions, it is very difficult for in-depth studies of individual cases to communicate meaningfully with claims about mean causal effects across a large set of cases. The conclusions discuss the broader challenges this distinction has for the study of comparative politics more broadly.

Dimensions of Impact in the Social Sciences

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina Haux
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Impact Pathways ◽  
The Social ◽  
Policy Models ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Research And Policy

Academics are increasingly required to demonstrate their impact on the wider world. The aim of this book is to compare and contextualise the dimensions of impact within the social sciences. Unlike most other studies of the 2014 Research Excellence Framework impact case studies, this book includes case studies from three different sub-panels (Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work and Politics and International Relations), which in themselves capture several disciplines, and therefore allows for a comparison of how impact and academic identify are defined and presented. The impact case studies are placed in an analytical framework that identifies different types of impact and impact pathways and places them in the context of policy models. Finally, it provides a comparison across time based on interviews with Social Policy professors who are looking back over 40 years of being involved as well as analysing the relationship between research and policy-making. This long view highlights successes but also the serendipitous and superficial nature of impact across time.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. xxviii-30
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Bloxam ◽  
Ian Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Heritage Management ◽  
Cultural Heritage Management ◽  
The Social ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
Research Questions

This chapter discusses a range of current debates into the ways in which Egyptologists are engaging with the problems and demands of moving towards greater collaborations across the social sciences if it is to remain a relevant discipline in its own right. Viewpoints from contributing authors are synthesized into a discussion of recent developments in the field from fresh research across both the archaeological and textual arms of the discipline. The volume considers the extent to which scholars need to be revising and re-thinking their research questions and moving towards greater collaborations within the discipline, and crucially outside of it. Moving the discipline forward is also about including voices outside of western discourses and into volumes such as this. The contributions from Chinese and Egyptian scholars therefore bring a fresh perspective to some current problems in Egyptological research particularly in cultural heritage management, museum curation, and investigating archaeological landscapes.

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