Under the direction of the Ottoman Text Archive Project (OTAP), the Svoboda Diary Project explores web-based technologies that will support and enhance the publication of a 19th century diary with interactive resources and visuals, including a map of the journey. The project aims to digitize and contextualize the experiences of nineteen-year-old Alexander Svoboda as he travels from his hometown of Baghdad to London in 1897. It has been a privilege for OTAP to partner with Iraqi researcher Nowf Allawi and collaborate resources via the internet. Although the original documents remain in Baghdad, Ms. Allawi provides scanned copies of Alexander's multilingual account as well as her own extensive research. The end result of the project's collaborative work will be a digital manuscript accompanied by an English translation- including background information gathered on the family and the historical implications of the text. The demographics and languages of the Middle East changed dramatically in the events of the last century, thus requiring research beyond the typical scope of the modern Middle East. Few travelogues of this period have been translated and even less are published. Alexander's diary provides the unique perspective of a European adolescent, writing in Arabic, passing through Damascus, Beirut and Cairo and the contrast of his journey through Rome, Paris and London. The journey includes encounters with bedouins, political figures and clergymen as he travels on mule litter, camel, boat and train. He records many landmarks and ruins that continue to attract travelers today as well as sights that have since disappeared. The Svoboda Diary Project exposes facets of a formative period of history and combines humanities scholarship with new opportunities within technological development.

The language the Israeli Defense Force uses to describe the theory behind their current operational practice constructs a captivatingly intellectual and imperative impression of contemporary urban warfare. Military theorists have lately looked to elite architectural academies for guidance in accumulating readings for their private urban research programs, notably including texts by Gilles Deleuze as well as Guy Debord and the Situationist International. These texts, which resonate strongly with the urbanism of 1960s Paris and its politicization of intersubjectivity, aid military commanders in reconceptualizing the urban domain and designing a new form of movement. In this method, often referred to as infestation, soldiers navigate cities through a series of overground tunnels made from holes blasted through walls of private living spaces, developing the idea of a city as not just the site, but the medium of warfare. The relationship between media theory and military practice is productive in theory’s complication of classical or anachronistic military paradigms; in this case, by smoothing the urban space into a pliable, borderless medium that is by nature contingent and in flux. In the redefinition of domestic interiors as thoroughfares, however, the boundary between public and private is obliterated, and what began as communication between enemies suddenly includes the civilian population in a traumatizing, humiliating way. In my research, I will examine the shuffling and rewriting of public and private space that occurs when the city becomes the medium of warfare, and the desire and violence that drives the interaction between the seemingly incompossible worlds of theory and practice. In performing this evaluation, I will illuminate and explore the potential new values necessary to embrace in order to reconcile the ethical bases of media theory and military practice, as well as the constellations of reality that emerge when the two bases collide.

The period of Irish history after the Great Famine and during the Land War was marked by significant tensions between landlords and their tenants. Both contemporary and current narratives of this period emphasize the extensive and violent nature of their conflicts. While conflicts were relatively common, homicides of landlords or their agents by tenants were comparatively rare. This study explores the characteristics of these homicides in an attempt to find common factors between them that may explain their occurrence. For as many homicides as possible between 1857 and 1878, this study analyzes demographic data on landlords and tenants, as well as other landlord characteristics such as size of estate. This data comes from secondary histories, census returns, parish records, and estate records. When possible, trial records are used to provide concrete knowledge of motive. A gross look at the results thus far indicates little commonality between homicides, although further analysis is needed to confirm this finding. In the end, the results of this study indicate that common narratives of landlord-tenant relations in mid-nineteenth century Ireland may not reflect the reality of the time, as relatively-rare homicides were exaggerated to enhance perceptions of conflict between landlords and tenants.

Texans are often assumed to embody the Texas Ranger stereotypes of ethnic intolerance, blind American pride and steadfast pro-security views. However, after the 2006 Secure Fence Act–outlining 670-miles of border fencing–was signed into law, it was uniquely the Texas border region, and not other U.S. border states, that adamantly opposed the U.S. federal government’s installation of the border fence. This research examines the statements of protest in the city of Eagle Pass, Texas in order to understand why proponents of border security would vehemently reject the U.S. border fence. This case study illuminates 1) the unique impact of the U.S. border fence on Texan border residents, 2) the cross-border community and interdependency between Texan cities and their Mexican counterparts, and 3) the distinct function of the fence in border communities versus for the U.S. federal government and the general U.S. population. My data consists of semi-structured interviews with Eagle Pass residents, collected July-August 2009. Their statements of protest become authentic indicators of their spatial sense of “we” (i.e. community). Eagle Pass residents are at the site of construction and are thus bombarded not only with the symbolic but physical implications of the border fence, both of which challenge the essential characteristics of their community. I find that historical, economic and social values of their local way of life and cross border community with Piedras Negras are compromised. This research moves away from the state-centric perspective of studying border policy and borders to examine alternative definitions of community from the locals perspective that extend beyond political boundaries. From this analysis, we can begin to further document how the built environment has both real and intangible significances for communities and that conceptions of Texans must be redefined.

Upon entering office in 1989, Argentine president Carlos Menem spearheaded an effort to implement what is commonly described as one of the most rapid and comprehensive neoliberal economic restructuring programs ever seen in Latin America. Many of these economic policies had major implications for the character of the Buenos Aires cityscape. My research traces the effects of neoliberal policies on practices of public space, urban citizenship, and national identity in Buenos Aires, Argentina through an analysis of urban contestation in the Palermo district. My project centers the following question: Why does the Palermo district have high levels of neighborhood-based activism, despite the fact that it is one of the wealthiest and most privileged districts in Buenos Aires’ northern corridor? In response to this question, I argue that Palermo residents mobilize in order to contest the neoliberalization of urban planning and defend the cultural identity of their barrio. More specifically, these residents reject neoliberal urban modernization because it destroys earlier edified forms of the city which physically represent the myth of Buenos Aires as a white, European, and middle-class city. Thus, my project traces how this national myth became inscribed into the Buenos Aires urban landscape at the turn of the 20th century, and how Palermo residents mobilize to defend this urban palimpsest. In order to advance this argument, my project examines two forms of urban contestation in the Palermo district. The first form is a local neighborhood green space defense group called La Asociación Amigos del Lago de Palermo made up of Palermo residents who campaign to prevent the privatization of Palermo Park. The second form is several cultural resistance groups in Palermo Viejo who mobilize in order to prevent the construction of mega-residential towers and the marginalization of middle-class residents in the district.

 This paper examines the geoeconomic discourses surrounding the development of the North Korean Kaesong Industrial Complex, a free economic zone six miles north of the Demilitarized Zone that separates the Koreas. In particular, I examine the way academic literature, media and governmental reports frame Kaesong as a modality where the two Koreas can meet in preparation for eventual reunification. These discourses promote a performative, imaginary geography replete with an active negotiation of border articulation envisioned through an economic flatness and promoted by trade. Instead, as governmental reports from both sides of the Pacific tacitly accept the longevity of the North Korean regime, as well as recognize the political and economic costs of what Korean reunification would entail, a push by the Korean governments has been made for maintaining the geopolitical status quo on the peninsula. This is done by putting development within Kaesong under terms of a détente, sustained by the legacies of imperial geographies, and through which all state motives and discourses for development in Kaesong should be reexamined. I find that my framing captures the real considerations of regional and foreign powers, multinational corporations and the geostrategic interests of North and South Korea, but are otherwise absent. By augmenting the dominant discourse, my paper points towards unseen ramifications of the contemporaneous transformation of the two Koreas, which had been formerly caught in Cold War geopolitical scripts, but have become self-motivated geoeconomic actors utilizing these scripts to negotiate the terms of their own development logics within neoliberal governance strategies.