The Vernacular Discourse of the "Arab Spring:" An Analysis of the Visual, the Embodied, and the Textual Rhetorics of the Karama Revolution

The Vernacular Discourse of the "Arab Spring" is a project that bridges the divide between the East and the West by offering new readings to Arab subjectivities. Through an analysis of the "Arab Spring" through the lens of vernacular discourse, it challenges the Euro-Americo-centric legacies of Orientalism in Western academia and the new wave of extremism in the Arab world by offering alternative representations of Arab bodies and subjectivities. To offer this new reading of the "Arab Spring," it explores the foundations of critical rhetoric as a theory and a practice and argues for a turn towards a critical vernacular discourse. The turn towards critical vernacular discourse is important as it urges the analyses of different artifacts produced by marginalized groups in order to understand their perspectives that have largely been foreclosed in traditional cultural studies research. Building on embodied/performative critical rhetoric, the vernacular discourses of the Arab revolutionary body examines other forms of knowledge productions that are not merely textual; more specifically, through data gathered in the Lhbib Bourguiba, Tunisia. This analysis of the political revolutionary body unveils the complexity underlining the discussion around issues of identity, agency and representation in the Middle East and North Africa, and calls for a critical study towards these issues in the region beyond the binary approach that has been practiced and applied by academics and media analysts. Hence, by analyzing vernacular discourse, this research locates a method of examining and theorizing the dialectic between agency, citizenry, and subjectivity through the study of how power structure is recreated and challenged through the use of the vernacular in revolutionary movements, as well as how marginalized groups construct their own subjectivities through the use of vernacular discourse. Therefore, highlighting the political prominence of evaluating the Arab Spring as a vernacular discourse is important in creating new ways of understanding communication in postcolonial/neocolonial settings.

Sovereignty and Intervention in the Middle East: From the Fall of the Ottoman Empire to the Arab Spring

This research provides an institutional explanation of the practices of external intervention in the Arab state system from the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922 to the Arab Spring. My explanation consists of two institutional variables: sovereignty and inter-state borders. I examine the changes in regional and international norms of sovereignty and their impact on the practices of external intervention in the Arab state system. I also examine the impact of the level of institutionalization of inter-state borders in the Arab World on the practices of external intervention. I argue that changes in regional and international norms of sovereignty and changes in the level of institutionalization of inter-state borders have constituted the significant variation over time in both the frequency and type of external intervention in the Arab state system from 1922 to the present. My institutional explanation and findings seriously challenge the traditional accounts of sovereignty and intervention in the Arab World, including the cultural perspectives that emphasize the conflict between sovereignty, Arabism, and Islam, the constructivist accounts that emphasize the regional norm of pan-Arabism, the comparative politics explanations that focus on the domestic material power of the Arab state, the post-colonial perspectives that emphasize the artificiality of the Arab state, and the realist accounts that focus on great powers and the regional distribution of power in the Middle East. This research also contributes to International Relations Theory. I construct a new analytical framework to study the relations between sovereignty, borders, and intervention, combining theoretical elements from the fields of Role Theory, Social Constructivism, and Institutionalization. Methodologically, this research includes both quantitative and qualitative analysis. I conduct content analysis of official documents of Arab states and the Arab League, Arabic press documents, and Arab political thought. I also utilize quantitative data sets on international intervention.

Validation of the Item-Attribute Matrix in TIMSS-Mathematics Using Multiple Regression and the LSDM

The purposes of this study were (1) to validate of the item-attribute matrix using two levels of attributes (Level 1 attributes and Level 2 sub-attributes), and (2) through retrofitting the diagnostic models to the mathematics test of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), to evaluate the construct validity of TIMSS mathematics assessment by comparing the results of two assessment booklets. Item data were extracted from Booklets 2 and 3 for the 8th grade in TIMSS 2007, which included a total of 49 mathematics items and every student's response to every item. The study developed three categories of attributes at two levels: content, cognitive process (TIMSS or new), and comprehensive cognitive process (or IT) based on the TIMSS assessment framework, cognitive procedures, and item type. At level one, there were 4 content attributes (number, algebra, geometry, and data and chance), 3 TIMSS process attributes (knowing, applying, and reasoning), and 4 new process attributes (identifying, computing, judging, and reasoning). At level two, the level 1 attributes were further divided into 32 sub-attributes. There was only one level of IT attributes (multiple steps/responses, complexity, and constructed-response). Twelve Q-matrices (4 originally specified, 4 random, and 4 revised) were investigated with eleven Q-matrix models (QM1 ~ QM11) using multiple regression and the least squares distance method (LSDM). Comprehensive analyses indicated that the proposed Q-matrices explained most of the variance in item difficulty (i.e., 64% to 81%). The cognitive process attributes contributed to the item difficulties more than the content attributes, and the IT attributes contributed much more than both the content and process attributes. The new retrofitted process attributes explained the items better than the TIMSS process attributes. Results generated from the level 1 attributes and the level 2 attributes were consistent. Most attributes could be used to recover students' performance, but some attributes' probabilities showed unreasonable patterns. The analysis approaches could not demonstrate if the same construct validity was supported across booklets. The proposed attributes and Q-matrices explained the items of Booklet 2 better than the items of Booklet 3. The specified Q-matrices explained the items better than the random Q-matrices.