SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Publication Record

Faour, M. 1999. Khams Sanawat baada Mu'tamar al-Qahira: Assiyasat Assukkaniya Fidduwal al-Arabiyya. United Nations.

King, D. E. 2001. Employees to asylees: Iraqi Kurds in an American dream. Selected papers on Refugees and Immigrants, IX. American Anthropological Association.

———. 2001. Kurdish approaches to fate and action. Journal of Kurdish Studies.

———. 2001. Review of Hermeneutics and Honor: Negotiating Female "Public" Space. Al-Abhath. American University of Beirut.

Zebian, S., and P. Denny. 2001. Integrative cognitive style in Middle-Eastern and Western groups: Multidimensional classification and major and minor property sorting. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 32:58–75.

Abstracts, Conferences, and Proceedings

King, D. E. November 1999. The Kurds and the West. Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Chicago, Illinois, USA.

———. April 2000. Kurdish transnationalism: Core culture writ large? Washington State University Asia Program Colloquium Series, Pullman, Washington, USA.

———. November 2000. Flight and refuge in the Kurdish mind. Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, California, USA.

———. January 2001. Patron-client relationships and Kurdish migration. Public lecture sponsored by the AUB Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies and the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Beirut, Lebanon.

———. February 2001. Some notes on qualitative social research among the Kurds of northern Iraq. Seminar sponsored by the AUB Faculty of Health Sciences, Beirut, Lebanon.

———. May 2001. The virgin and the de-facto state: Honor and the Iraqi Kurdish intifada. AUB Center for Behavioral Research "Brown Bag" series, Beirut, Lebanon.

Research Projects

Refuge-seeking in Kurdish life

This ongoing project investigates the practice of refuge-seeking, a process whereby humans seek protection from violence by fleeing to refuge-granters who provide sanctuary. The state of relative safety in the place of sanctuary is usually dependent on the refuge-granters' social stability vis-a-vis the refugees’ lack thereof. In recent years, social science has produced a vast literature on refugees, most of which situates them within the broader schemata of diasporas and transnationalism. Little of this material has dealt with the social dynamics at play in the refuge-seeking process. For example, what role do traditional social hierarchies such as peasant/client and landlord/patron play in the refuge process? To what degree do international refuge-seeking patterns mirror those taking place on a smaller scale? The Kurdish experience offers an ideal opportunity for investigation of these issues. International migration by Kurdish refugees is well-documented and currently high-profile. Refuge-seeking on a local scale is also very common. For example, preliminary data suggest that most Kurdish adults in northern Iraq have sought refuge at least once during their lifetimes. The Kurds are, thus, an ideal population among which to investigate the practices, ideas, and social roles surrounding the process of refuge-seeking. King, D.E. (PL).

Supported by URB
Completed or in progress at AUB

When worlds collide: The Kurdish diaspora from the inside out

In this study, I examine the process of diaspora formation among Kurds from the Bahdinan area of Iraq at the level of decision-making in households and patrilineages. Individuals ponder leaving for the West in light of an array of factors that exemplify the dual roles of social structure and human agency in out-migration from Bahdinan. Fear and suffering are not new to the Kurds; flight and refuge-seeking are familiar schemata. Patron-client relationships and gender roles frame the way Kurds interpret their role vis-a-vis the West and Westerners. These and other social structural factors combine with theistic notions of determinism, leading people to frame human agency as striving within the bounds of what fate has dealt them. Leaving for the West is a prominent response to fear and suffering as well as an outgrowth of the allure that the West holds in the minds of many Kurds. King, D. E. (PL).

Supported by Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and Washington State University
Completed or in progress at Washington State University

Everyday mathematical thinking in traditional and modernizing Lebanese business people: Experimental and ethnographic approaches to the development of mathematical thinking

This study draws on cultural and mathematical cognition approaches to mathematical thinking while investigating differences in mathematical thinking among Lebanese business people.  It explores how the use of specific cultural artifacts such as calculators and cash registers, and involvement in specific cultural practices, specifically various literacy practices, influence how numbers are represented and how arithmetical problems are solved by two groups of Lebanese sellers: one consisting of modernizing Lebanese shopkeepers who emphasize literacy-based numeracy practices, and another consisting of traditional Lebanese shopkeepers who emphasize orally based numeracy practices. This study follows up on existing research by Saxe (1991) and Zebian (2000) showing that individuals with high levels of school numeracy skill show decontextualized mathematical skills, while individuals with low levels of school numeracy skill show highly contextualized numeracy practices. Contextualized numeracy practices emphasize the concrete properties of numbers and their relations to objects and de-emphasize the abstract properties. The first phase of the proposed project will involve ethnographic observations of sellers' everyday numeracy practices in order to develop hypotheses about the nature of the cognitive skills required for modern and traditional selling practices. These hypotheses will in turn be investigated in controlled experimental studies comparing the cognitive skills of traditional and modernizing sellers. Zebian, S., and C. Haddad (RA).

Supported by URB
Completed or in progress at AUB

MARAL:  A study of mathematics instructional reform for all in Lebanon

The purpose of this study is to understand and provide detailed descriptions of mathematics instruction in Lebanese classrooms at the elementary level. The central questions of interest are:

· What is the nature of the mathematical tasks with which students are engaged in Lebanese elementary classrooms?

· To what extent are students learning to think, reason, and communicate at a high level in mathematics? 

· How does the teaching observed in Lebanese elementary classrooms serve to encourage (or inhibit) student engagement in high-level thinking, reasoning, and communication in mathematics?

· What kind of professional development is needed to assist teachers in supporting their students to think, reason, and communicate at a high level in mathematics?

The above-mentioned research questions will be addressed primarily through the systematic study of a sample of elementary classrooms representing both urban and rural public and private schools.  Because little research focusing on mathematics classroom instructional processes has been done in Lebanon, the proposed work is relatively small in scope, and aims at providing research methods and frameworks on which to build future mathematics classroom research. The research will be conducted in four phases: development, data collection, analysis and writing, and feedback.  The overarching consideration will be the extent to which the results of this research can serve to improve mathematics teaching and learning at the elementary school level in Lebanon and abroad. Zebian, S., and M. Henningsen.

Supported by URB and Middle-Eastern Research Competition (application for funding submitted)
Completed or in progress at AUB