Browsing by Department "Asian and Middle Eastern Studies"
Now showing items 1-18 of 18
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Ainu as the Other
(2017-04-29)The Ainu, an indigenous people of Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, have often been referred to both in Japan and in the West as being a “dying race”. This thesis seeks to deconstruct that myth and contextualize it within ... -
"Are You Gay?": A Queer Ethnography of Sex and Sexuality in Cairo
(2014-10-17)Focusing specifically in urban cosmopolitan Cairo during the aftermath of the alleged January 25th Revolution, this ethnographic project is an invitation to a deeper exploration of sex and sexuality in the Middle East. During ... -
Arguing Justice in Yemen’s Civil War: A Researcher’s Notebook
(2019-04-08)This research project explores the question of how and which stories nations and people construct about justice in international relations through the case study of the conflict in Yemen. The war in Yemen has raged since ... -
Child Valuation in Contemporary China: Abandonment, Institutional Care, and Transnational Adoption
(2020-04-17)In this thesis, I contend that orphaned and relinquished children’s positionality in Chinese society reveals a complex entanglement between changing domestic and international policies and popular Western perceptions of ... -
Denying Difference: Japanese Identity and the Myth of Monoethnic Japan
(2015-07-09)In this thesis, I tackle the notion of identity within the very specific sociocultural space of Japan. I critique the conception of Japanese identity as it has emerged in concert with the West through the 19th and 20th centuries. ... -
Fast Food, Street Food: Western Fast Food's Influence on Fast Service Food in China
(2018-05-01)The phenomenal success of Western fast food brands in China has fascinated researchers and business people alike since its dawn in the late 1980’s. The two largest Western fast food brands in China, McDonald’s and Kentucky ... -
Female Labor Force Participation in Turkic Countries: A Study of Azerbaijan and Turkey
(2019-04)Encouraging female labor force participation (FLFP) should be a goal of any country attempting to increase its productive capacity. Understanding the determinants and motivations of labor force participation requires isolating ... -
Heritage with a High Price Tag: The Rise of China's Luxury Automotive Industry
(2018-03-28)This thesis seeks to answer the question, “Which attributes in China’s market conditions during the past 40 years have led to the creation of the largest automotive industry in the world?” The first chapter provides a historical ... -
Intertwining Narratives: The Copts and their Muslim Relations
(2010-10-04)Coptic-Muslim relations are often portrayed in black-and-white binaries. The Copts are the oppressed minority, whereas the Muslims are the aggressive majority; the Copts are practitioners of a subservient faith, while the ... -
On the Nature of 20th and 21st Century Gendered Marketing Strategies and Perceptions Toward Cigarette Products in the United States and China
(2019-03)This thesis examines the prevailing sentiments toward cigarettes and the targeted marketing strategies in the 20th and 21st century of the evolving markets in the United States and China. Specifically, marketing campaigns ... -
Otome Games: Narrative, Gender and Globalization
(2019-04-04)The goal of the thesis is to answer the question of how otome (maiden) games, despite their heavily cultured origins, have been able to create playable romance narratives that a global audience can understand, relate, play, ... -
The Effects of Everyday Discrimination on the Mental Health of Muslim Students at Duke University
(2019-04-10)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 ... -
The Islamic State: The Manifestation of a Violently Intimate Utopian Imaginary
(2016-05-06)This thesis seeks a complex understanding of the Islamic State through a multi-layered analysis of its territorial construction and physical form, its ideology, and its virtuality. By analyzing the way each of these aspects ... -
The role of national status in refugee narratives: A case study on Palestinian and Sudanese productions
(2016-05-07)The 1951 Refugee Convention recognizes two groups of refugees: one outside the country of his/her nationality and another group without nationality outside of the place of their habitual residence. However, because stateless ... -
“Three Tentacles of Terror”: Israeli Securitization after the Arab Spring
(2016-04-25)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. ... -
Tongzhi Tales in Mainland China: Chinese Gay Male Subjectivities in Online Comrade Literature
(2013-04)This thesis considers Comrade Literature (同志文学tongzhi wenxue), a genre of contemporary Chinese homosexual (tongzhi) fiction, as it has emerged on the internet in Mainland China. Although Comrade Literature first emerged ... -
Translation of Maithilisharan Gupt's Saket
(2018-04)Maithilisharan Gupt’s Saket, written in 1932, is an epic Hindi poem presenting the story of the Ramayana from a humanized and highly emotional perspective. As the work of a National Poet written during a time in which nationalist ...
