Browsing by Author "McLarney, Ellen"

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    Burqa in Vogue: Fashioning Afghanistan
    (Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2009-12) McLarney, Ellen
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    Malcolm X's Gospel
    (Black Perspectives, 2022-03-28) McLarney, Ellen
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    The Children Left Behind: Orientalism, Patriotism, and Xenophobia in U.S. Textbooks
    (2017-05-05) Cammerzell, Helen
    How has education changed since September 11, 2001? Due to the Bush presidency and the administrations that followed, the 9/11 terrorist attacks have become a pivotal component of nationalist and patriotic identity in the U.S. public sphere. K-12 textbooks have adopted this narrative whole-heartedly and their authors encourage students to support any and all national responses to the terrorist attacks, especially those that support the War on Terror. In doing so, educational material has revamped the orientalist tropes about the Middle East that intensified during the Cold War across America. In a post-9/11 world, the Middle East and the identities associated with the terrorist attacks, specifically Arabs and Muslims, became increasingly flattened into the enemy of the United States, to whom young nationals are told to exert their patriotism against. Across numerous textbooks from the Cold War to today I examine the racist and xenophobic outpourings of material, specifically pertaining to the Middle East, Arabs, and Muslims. I then compare this discourse to the post-9/11 era, and evaluate the changes and increased conflation of the region and its peoples with terrorism and anti-Western sentiments. American education and textbooks are controlled by white elitist and conservative voices who hold a primary interest in continued domination of the region. While there are forms of resistance across schools in the United States against this politically constructed narrative, specifically in Islamic institutions, there is still so much work to be done to reify American identity within education, without othering those blamed for the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
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    The Effects of Everyday Discrimination on the Mental Health of Muslim Students at Duke University
    (2019-04-10) Nevid, Daniella
    This thesis seeks to elucidate the relationship between experiences of discrimination and mental health state among the Muslim population at Duke. In the first chapter, I argue that although the negative relationship between experiences of discrimination and mental health has been widely supported in minority racial groups, there remains a dearth in the literature on this topic in minority religious groups. The Muslim population in the U.S. is particularly vulnerable to experiences of discrimination given the Muslim religious identity has been racialized by the American public. In the second chapter, I give an overview of Duke’s relationship to the Methodist Church and a timeline of Duke’s relationship with its minority student population. Ultimately, university records teach us that the Muslim community at Duke has met harsh discrimination and lack of institutional support. The third chapter of this thesis includes interviews with four integral members of Duke’s Muslim population throughout the years to illuminate what it means to be Muslim at Duke. Finally, the fourth chapter presents the research I conducted this semester. I surveyed experiences of discrimination and rates of depressive and anxious symptomology among the current Muslim student population at Duke. Significant, positive correlations were found between anxiety and discrimination and anxiety and depression. These findings beg university reform including increased support for Duke’s Muslim student population.
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    The Revival of Women’s Liberation
    (2018) McLarney, Ellen
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    “Three Tentacles of Terror”: Israeli Securitization after the Arab Spring
    (2016-04-25) Deardorff, Tessa
    Securitization theory, while designed to describe the politics surrounding extra-military threats to a nation, has rarely been used as a frame to analyze countries that exist in a state of deep and permanent securitization. In these nations, which include Israel, security is a mainstay of political and daily life and discourse. This thesis uses a modified version of securitization theory to analyze the reasoning and motivations behind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s responses to regional and domestic events between the beginning of the Arab Spring in December 2011 and the end of Operation Protective Edge in August 2014. It argues that the Prime Minister maintains a set of three discourses – the enemy nation-state threat, the para-state threat, and the domestic militant threat – pervasive in modern Israeli society and anchored in the nation’s understanding of its political and military history. The Prime Minister skillfully deployed these discourses over the thirty-three-month period in order to garner national and international support for increased domestic securitization and military operations, both of which served to further his political and personal agenda. I break the discourses into three sections: first focusing on the history of the discourses, then analyzing the Prime Minister’s juggling of the discourses from the beginning of the Arab Spring to the end of Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012 largely in the name of the Camp David Accords, and lastly analyzing his use of the domestic militant discourse in order to undermine the Palestinian unity government and provoke Operations Brother’s Keeper and Protective Edge during Summer 2014. My analysis underscores the utility of securitization theory in analyzing the complexity of Israeli politics. Even in a nation as subject to military threats as Israel, a leader may not always be acting in the state’s best interest.
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