scholarly journals Will Saudi's 2030 Vision Raise the Students’ Awareness to National Literature? Saudi Literature and Identity

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 95-105
Author(s):  
Mubarak Altwaiji ◽  
Majed Alenezi ◽  
Sajeena Gayathrri ◽  
Ebrahim Mohammed Alwuraafi ◽  
Maryam Naif Alanazi
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Social Constructs ◽  
Northern Border ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Modern Identity

Forming national identity is placed on top of the seven aspects of High-Impact Educational Practices (HIEPs) in Northern Border University. Similarly, the concept of academic awareness to national literature has been one of the main challenges to national literature in the Middle East. Just as the strong presence of national identity in Saudi’s 2030 vision has initiated re-evaluations of how national identity is shaped, Saudi novel has similar concerns that inform social constructs of national identity through overarching themes and comprehensive representations of cultural issues. This study investigates the ways in which two Saudi novelists interrogate the intertwined issues shared by 2030 vision and national novel which address the archetypal Saudi identity: first, that the construction of modern identity requires much cultural openness with the world; second, that construction of Saudi identity needs exclusion of otherness; and third, that national identity depends on the rich history of two historical regions – Najd and Hijaz - that binds identity to a unified territory. The study focuses on how these novels give visibility to issues that are at the core of 2030 vision’s social and cultural aspect such as life style, appearance behaviours, attitudes, accepting differences and willingness to work and volunteer. Drawing on this narrative analysis, the study advocates for the utility of introducing national novel for undergraduate students to help them perceive identity as a position and support their identity enactment.

scholarly journals Vampires in Video Games: Mythic Tropes for Innovative Storytelling

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto Dillon ◽  
Anita Lundberg
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Malay Archipelago ◽  
History Of ◽  
Experimental Games ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Selection Of

This paper discusses traditional vampire tropes as a tool for innovation and novel experiences in the history of video games. A selection of games and vampires will be analysed in terms of  gameplay and storytelling elements to show how the rich  mythology and folklore that characterises these liminal beings can be successfully employed in a variety of settings and contexts. We draw on examples from the early days of video games with titles like “Dracula” (Imagic for Intellivision, 1982) set in a virtual London and evoking European folklore, to the rich possibilities offered by “Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines” (Activision for PC, 2004) which conjures up the sub-tropical New Orleans vampire tradition, and then turn to the latest experimental games using the example  of “Tainted” (ITE/NUS for PC, 2016), which taps into the rich Pontianak vampire-ghost myths of the Malay Archipelago. Different experiences will be discussed via explanatory lenses – such as  Labov’s (1972, 1997) narrative analysis and the AGE/6-11 framework (Dillon, 2010, 2016) – to gain insights into how to build compelling myth-based narrative in games in original and surprising ways. The paper also analyses how specific vampire myths reflect socio-cultural issues of particular times and places. Thus, every  telling of such myths – whether though oral tales, novels, cinema,  or video games – brings the myth alive to engage with liminal or repressed aspects of a society.

scholarly journals Why Women Want to Play Sports: Identity, Culture, and Motivation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Johnston ◽  
Karen Weatherington
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Competitive Sports ◽  
College Level ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Division 1 ◽  
Sports Programs ◽  
History Of ◽  
On Line ◽  
Sporting Activities ◽  
Peace Programs

This paper is part of a series of research dedicated to specific issues uncovered in sports-for-peace programs. Other research has focused on cross-cultural issues, for example. In this research project, the authors were interested in how to encourage the inclusion and promotion of women in all sports around the world. The authors sought to discover who encouraged the women to play competitive sports, how long they had been playing sports, the barriers they encountered when playing competitive sports, and how they felt about identifying as sportswomen at the higher levels of competition. The authors used an on-line anonymous survey instrument and asked Division I college volleyball coaches to forward the link to their teams for voluntary participation in the study. While the authors review the literature as well as the recent history of many competitive sports for women, volleyball was chosen as the focus for the on-line survey because it is one of the most common sports women can play in college at the very competitive Division 1 level in the U.S. The survey questions were both demographic and open-ended in nature. The authors surveyed 149 women who played college-level sports. Narrative analysis was used to understand the themes presented in the open-ended question data. The authors propose that family dynamics, availability of sports programs, and gendered discourses have a combined effect on women’s orientation to particular sports, the women’s long term dedication to the sport, and at the competitive level at which they play. These findings should be considered before inviting women into sports-for-peace programs. The findings have global implications for inclusion and promotion of women in sporting activities. This research will be of interest to coaches, sportswomen, peace educators, gender educators, as well as practitioners who run international sports-for-peace programs.

Peering Beyond the Imperial Gaze: Using Digital Tools to Construct a Spatial History of Conquest

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy M. Mikecz
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous People ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Digital Tools ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
Digital Maps ◽  
Spatial History ◽  
Colonial Texts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Spatial Narrative

Ethnohistorians and other scholars have long noted how European colonial texts often concealed the presence and participation of indigenous peoples in New World conquests. This scholarship has examined how European sources (both texts and maps) have denied indigenous history, omitted indigenous presence, elided indigenous agency, and ignored indigenous spaces all while exaggerating their own power and importance. These works provide examples of colonial authors performing these erasures, often as a means to dispossess. What they lack, however, is a systematic means of identifying, locating, and measuring these silences in space and time. This article proposes a spatial history methodology which can make visible, as well as measurable and quantifiable the ways in which indigenous people and spaces have been erased by colonial narratives. It presents two methods for doing this. First, narrative analysis and geovisualization are used to deconstruct the imperial histories found in colonial European sources. Second it combines text with maps to tell a new (spatial) narrative of conquest. This new narrative reconstructs indigenous activity through a variety of digital maps, including ‘mood maps’, indigenous activity maps, and maps of indigenous aid. The resulting spatial narrative shows the Spanish conquest of Peru was never inevitable and was dependent on the constant aid of immense numbers of indigenous people.

A Qualified Assertion Database for the History of Places

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 95-115
Author(s):  
Brandon Plewe
Keyword(s):  
Data Model ◽  
Temporal Change ◽  
Religious Congregations ◽  
Historical Gis ◽  
The Past ◽  
Model Based ◽  
Complex Information ◽  
Invaluable Tool ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich

Historical place databases can be an invaluable tool for capturing the rich meaning of past places. However, this richness presents obstacles to success: the daunting need to simultaneously represent complex information such as temporal change, uncertainty, relationships, and thorough sourcing has been an obstacle to historical GIS in the past. The Qualified Assertion Model developed in this paper can represent a variety of historical complexities using a single, simple, flexible data model based on a) documenting assertions of the past world rather than claiming to know the exact truth, and b) qualifying the scope, provenance, quality, and syntactics of those assertions. This model was successfully implemented in a production-strength historical gazetteer of religious congregations, demonstrating its effectiveness and some challenges.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Winter
Keyword(s):  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Rich Diversity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Oppression ◽  
The Rich ◽  
To Come

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The book has shown that the multiplicity of lived ʻAlawi experiences cannot be reduced to the sole question of religion or framed within a monolithic narrative of persecution; that the very attempt to outline a single coherent history of “the ʻAlawis” may indeed be misguided. The sources on which this study has drawn are considerably more accessible, and the social and administrative realities they reflect consistently more mundane and disjointed, than the discourse of the ʻAlawis' supposed exceptionalism would lead one to believe. Therefore, the challenge for historians of ʻAlawi society in Syria and elsewhere is not to use the specific events and structures these sources detail to merely add to the already existing metanarratives of religious oppression, Ottoman misrule, and national resistance but rather to come to a newer and more intricate understanding of that community, and its place in wider Middle Eastern society, by investigating the lives of individual ʻAlawi (and other) actors within the rich diversity of local contexts these sources reveal.

Divination and Human Nature

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter T. Struck
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Observable Fact

This book casts a new perspective on the rich tradition of ancient divination—the reading of divine signs in oracles, omens, and dreams. Popular attitudes during classical antiquity saw these readings as signs from the gods while modern scholars have treated such beliefs as primitive superstitions. The book reveals instead that such phenomena provoked an entirely different accounting from the ancient philosophers. These philosophers produced subtle studies into what was an odd but observable fact—that humans could sometimes have uncanny insights—and their work signifies an early chapter in the cognitive history of intuition. Examining the writings of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonists, the book demonstrates that they all observed how, setting aside the charlatans and swindlers, some people had premonitions defying the typical bounds of rationality. Given the wide differences among these ancient thinkers, the book notes that they converged on seeing this surplus insight as an artifact of human nature, projections produced under specific conditions by our physiology. For the philosophers, such unexplained insights invited a speculative search for an alternative and more naturalistic system of cognition. Recovering a lost piece of an ancient tradition, this book illustrates how philosophers of the classical era interpreted the phenomena of divination as a practice closer to intuition and instinct than magic.

FORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF RURAL ARCHITECTURE IN THE FORMER KETSKAYA VOLOST

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. V. Sitnikova
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Architectural Analysis ◽  
Tomsk Region ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Rural Architecture ◽  
The Village ◽  
Rich History

The article considers the historical and cultural heritage of villages of the former Ketskaya volost, which is currently a part of the Tomsk region. The formation of Ketsky prison and the architecture of large settlements of the former Ketskaya volost are studied. Little is known about the historical and cultural heritage of villages of the Tomsk region and the problems of preserving historical settlements of the country.The aim of this work is to study the formation and development of the village architecture of the former Ketskaya volost, currently included in the Tomsk region.The following scientific methods are used: a critical analysis of the literature, comparative architectural analysis and systems analysis of information, creative synthesis of the findings. The obtained results can be used in preparation of lectures, reports and communication on the history of the Siberian architecture.The scientific novelty is a study of the historical and cultural heritage of large settlements of the former Ketskaya volost, which has not been studied and published before. The methodological and theoretical basis of the study is theoretical works of historians and architects regarding the issue under study as well as the previous  author’s work in the field.It is found that the historical and cultural heritage of the villages of the former Ketskaya volost has a rich history. Old historical buildings, including religious ones are preserved in villages of Togur and Novoilinka. The urban planning of the villages reflects the design and construction principles of the 18th century. The rich natural environment gives this area a special touch. 

A Russian Island in the Orthodox East: Mount Athos in the 19th – early 20th Centuries

2018 ◽  
pp. 27-36
Author(s):  
Лора Герд ◽  
Lora Gerd
Keyword(s):  
The Balkans ◽  
Special Place ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich

Mount Athos holds a special place in the East Christian world. The Russian monastery foun-ded in the 11th century experienced its height in the 19th – early 20th centuries, when it received an official title “Russian” and its brethren numbered up to 1800 people. The deep respect towards the Holy Mount in Russia, the diplomatic support from the Russian Embassy at Constantinople and the rich donations contributed to the prosperity of “Russian Athos”. The systematic indepth study of the sources made it possible to rewrite the history of this unique phenomenon on the Balkans.

Historical Representations and Recent Changes

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jürgen Schaflechner
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
Detailed History ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Representations ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Many Sources ◽  
Over Time

Chapter 3 introduces the tradition of ritual journeys and sacred geographies in South Asia, then hones in on a detailed history of the grueling and elaborate pilgrimage attached to the shrine of Hinglaj. Before the construction of the Makran Coastal Highway the journey to the Goddess’s remote abode in the desert of Balochistan frequently presented a lethally dangerous undertaking for her devotees, the hardships of which have been described by many sources in Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Sindhi, and Urdu. This chapter draws heavily from original sources, including travelogues and novels, which are supplanted with local oral histories in order to weave a historical tapestry that displays the rich array of practices and beliefs surrounding the pilgrimage and how they have changed over time. The comparative analysis demonstrates how certain motifs, such as austerity (Skt. tapasyā), remain important themes within the whole Hinglaj genre even in modern times while others have been lost in the contemporary era.

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