Cultural Reflections
Decolonization of the Metaspace: Digital Humanities and the Question of Ideological Dominance over Space and Time
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hadeer Aboelnagah
Digital Humanities as an emerging interdisciplinary area of study and academic inquiry remains open for extensive exploration and potentialities (Ramy 2015). The advent of VR narration provides the possibilities of crossing the boundaries and conventions of traditional learning and fosters models of collaborative creativity (Daskolia, 2015). Furthermore, it broadens the prospects for the recreation of literary/historic narratives that allows for the active interaction between memory, space and the Meta space (Wang 2019). In his “New Horizons for the Study of Propel; Interdisciplinary, Internationalization and Innovation” Chad Garfield anticipated that Digital Humanities will be the leading edge of re-imagining of higher education in the twenty first century for the promising ability of moving beyond the epistemological dichotomies of the late 20th century (153, 2014). However, deploying the Meta space poses a set of challenges, one of which echos the ever-unsolvable question regarding the domination of the creator’s perspective and ideological stand over the narrative. The current study untangles the complexity of the colonizer/colonized relation within virtual literary/historic spaces. The study introduces examples of the employability of VR narratives as an educational tool that can allow the reliving of past experiences and creating future relations with space and time. It benefits from earlier educational experiments in literary studies like Klaudia Hiu Yen Lee’s “Literature Across Time”, 2022. The objective of the study is to explore the correlation between the long-standing questions of colonial dominance in narratology through endeavors of decolonization of the Meta space.
What’s with the Head Covering: Muslim Women’s Identity and the Hijab
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Azra Mahmood
This paper provides overview about the lived experiences of Muslim women and the hijab and explores the myths vs realities about the diverse culture, nuances in Islamic context, and Muslim woman's identity when wearing the headscarf/hijab. The objective of this research is to reach a place of civic and cultural understanding through radical empathy and to humanize the Muslim community and Muslim woman as well as to showcase the reality of the hijab's meaning from a cultural and religious context. We also share how the hijab has become politicized/political (i.e., 2024 Olympic games).
The Role That People Play in Changing the Future of a Nation’s Societal Standards and Economic Structure as Seen Through Japanese and US History
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cooper Brown, Greg Laurence
The concept of this paper and all its findings came about from rigorous research across many sources as well as personal research conducted in Japan. I traveled to Japan in the summer of 2024 on a faculty-led study abroad program through the University of Michigan-Flint. I intended to note how hospitality was perceived and implemented in varying business structures throughout Japan. While there I found that Japanese people, not just business owners and employees, are some of the kindest, nicest, and most hospitable people on earth. This takeaway raised the question which would become the foundation for my thesis. How can two countries with such similar economic structures, Like America and Japan, differ so widely in cultural standards? Further research enabled me to identify a potential reason American and Japanese cultures differ in societal standards and economic structures: Throughout history, certain individuals changed the structure of their country to the extent that modern day cultural norms can be traced back to their direct influence. Individuals like Japanese economist Shibusawa Eiichi and American banker J.P. Morgan were particularly interesting due to how they were capitalists from similar economic environments yet in the end used their social status to prioritize vastly different goals. With roughly twenty different cited sources, my own personal research, and the input of Professor Gregory Laurence, I share my understanding of just how significant a role individuals play in changing their nation’s economy and society.
American Citizenship in State-Occupied Hawaiʻi: ‘Spaces’ in and Through Which Citizenship is Seen, Cultivated, Practiced, Contested, Resisted
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sarah Marusek, Line-Noue Memea Kruse
Benedict Anderson's book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, argues that nations are imagined as both limited and sovereign. The style in which they are imagined, is in part, through the political consciousness and spatial landscape of the discourse and practice of politics. The power to define national horizons reflects a constructed intentionality of citizenship with restrictive qualifiers and exclusionary goals. This study discusses the historic and contemporary discourse surrounding how political legitimacy is redefined within space, politics, geography, colonialism, land based understandings, construct of human rights, and belonging. Yet the full import of the expansive, yet atmospheric scope of lawscape as discussed by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos generates a problematic socio-spatial tension concerning the productive realm of belonging. To contextualize space and law, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos identifies two dimensions of peculiarity (1) law grounds and ostracizes (2) spatial justice as an alternative of a regional populace, which can be also analyzed within the Moana through the relational spatial understanding of the vā. Within the vā, this in-between spatial arrangement encompasses and restricts (tapu/taboo) human to human and human to non-human relationships including the operationalization of law in private and public spaces. Drs. Kruse and Marusek reveal how humanities and social sciences overlap and complement interdisciplinary studies to address the frontiers of closures within citizenship discourse augmenting the rise of American expansionism abroad concurrent to domestic isolationism.
