Tag: David Frank

Finding Home in Human Rights: A Correlation between Conflicting Identities of “Home” in the Palestinian-American Immigration Experience and the Global Citizenship Identity

Presenter: Dan Le

Mentors: Diane Baxter, Anthropology; David Frank, Honors College

Poster: 41

Major: Anthropology

For immigrants and refugees, the concept of “home” is seldom a concrete definition, as the question of where “home” is – either in the country of origin or the new country, activates a tension in self-identity. For the Palestinian immigration and refugee experience, the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian Conflict produces an even more complex tension. The purpose of this study is to explore this tension in a Palestinian-American context. To do so, the research project focuses on an oral history project about Ibrahim Hamide, a restaurateur and human rights activist in Eugene for the past 30 years. The project involved taking participant observation notes prior to the series of interviews, conducting the interviews themselves, coding the interviews for common themes, and then analyzing the information with other works about the Palestinian/Arab American experience. The primary findings of this study indicate that Orientalism, a term by Edward Said that means the representation of the Middle East in a stereotyped and colonialist manner, has a major influence on the tension of self-identity. For Hamide, this tension leads him to find solace in human rights activism and embrace a more globalized sense of identity, rather than choosing between his two “homes.” The significances of this research are that it serves as documented piece of history for the Eugene community and contributes to the importance of the human rights philosophy.

The Evolution of Law: How Medieval Peasant Disputes Shaped Legal Systems

Presenter: Caroline Doss

Faculty Mentor: Michael Peixoto, David Frank

Presentation Type: Oral

Primary Research Area: Social Science

Major: Undeclared- Anticipated: Anthropology

How have legal proceedings evolved throughout the centuries? In the late nineteenth century, Frederick William Maitland argued that many judicial proceedings were not derived from Roman Law or even royal laws, but from customs of the medieval peasantry and non-judicial decisions and compromises. In more recent decades, a wealth of scholarship has analyzed disputes and settlements in medieval France and England, making connections between practices that used to exist and those that have survived to create our current legal system. For example, Fredric Cheyett’s article “Suum Cuique Tribuere” provides a definition for law that stresses the important of compromise in dispute settlements, an idea present in courts today. However, the legal proceedings of the nobility have also influenced the legal system present in the United States. Through an analysis of medieval disputes and settlements, as well as analyses of the different sorts of trial, primarily annulments and marriage law, my research explores the process in which court practices in divorce and marriage proceedings from both the nobility and peasantry have survived as decisions made out of court came to be a functional legal system. Texts such as Alison Weir’s “Eleanor of Aquitaine” and Baldwin’s “Government of Philip Augustus” will offer key insights into the marriage and annulment processes of medieval France and the evolution of such laws.

A Rhetorical Analysis Of Reports About Mass Atrocities: Rwanda, Bosnia, Syria, And Myanmar

Presenter(s): Eleanor Estreich − English, Economics

Faculty Mentor(s): David Frank

Oral Session 1C

Research Area: Humanities – Rhetorical Analysis

Speaking from Beirut in February 2018, the United Nations’ regional humanitarian coordinator for the Syria crisis, Panos Moumtzis, said that “’Humanitarian diplomacy is failing…We are not able to reach the conscience or the ears of politicians, of decision makers, of people in power’” (NYTimes). Moumtzis also “wondered what level of violence it would take to shock the world into action” (NYTimes). The prevalence of mass atrocities should demand our attention, yet moving decision makers to pay attention or act on mass atrocities remains a significant problem. This problem is magnified by the sheer number of victims in modern wars, and pervasive psychological barriers that often prevent decision makers from being able to comprehend the meaning of distant human lives underlying statistical description. Given these issues, this thesis formulates a response to a broad request by Charles J. Brown, a practitioner in Washington D.C., to study messaging strategies in reports about atrocities. Reports are a widely used communicative practice for the US government and other institutions, so this thesis considers reports that present data and information about atrocities to decision makers, rather than a broad journalistic readership. In order to reach the conscience of those in power, and strive to elicit better decision-making processes about atrocities, rhetorical analysis is used to identify more effective ways of selecting and presenting input data about atrocities for decision makers. Building from the research of Paul Slovic, who identifies the role of dual-process theories of thinking in our psychological responses to atrocities, this analysis also focuses on how the psychological underpinnings of reports should guide writing recommendations. The first chapter uses qualitative rhetorical analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of three reports issued about Rwanda and Bosnia. The second chapter interrogates US discourse around al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria, which was comprised of argumentation for and against military intervention. The purpose of the second chapter is to identify how the larger discourse might direct argument invention in the report-writing process. Preliminary findings suggest that reports fail to capture the attention of decision makers when they use inconsistent scaling mechanisms for representing statistical deaths, and that risk is usually framed in terms of intervention (rather than nonintervention), to the detriment of the decision-making processes that follow.
*Nytimes: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/world/middleeast/syria-bombing-damascus-united-nations. html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article