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http://hdl.handle.net/11375/28234
Title: | MAPPING THE INTELLECTUAL STRUCTURE OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES: AN AUTHOR CO-CITATION ANALYSIS |
Authors: | Karimi Pour, Kosar |
Advisor: | Fox, John |
Department: | Sociology |
Publication Date: | 2022 |
Abstract: | The focus of my dissertation is on Middle Eastern Studies (MES) as produced in English from the mid-20th century onward. The historians of MES talk about a post-Saidian divide in the field between academic-left and -right. When examining this divide, the common practice has mainly been to focus on how political developments affected MES. This work analytically transcends the political surface and ask whether the two clusters can be observed in the mapping of MES. It then explores the properties of this intellectual map, and asks how, in the overly political field of MES, ‘the social’ and ‘the cognitive’ aspects of knowledge production interact. To map MES this work uses Author Co-Citation Analysis (based on the relative frequencies with which pairs of authors are cited together by citing documents). The research population comprises 202 influential scholars who have produced knowledge in English about the cotemporary period or recent history of the ME. Google Scholar was used as the source of citation data, and the node attributes, along with the scholars’ political and paradigmatic tendencies, were collected from their online profiles. The map shows no indication of a polarization in the field but shows differences between insider and outsider inquiries and verifies the local situatedness of the process of knowledge production. The network hints towards the presence of at least three clusters, but not along the lines of the scholars’ political and paradigmatic tendencies. Knowledge about the ME as whole is produced in a cooperative endeavor among scholars with different geographical connections, but in the case of Israel and Turkey, the clusters are more homogeneous. The intellectual map also points towards the silenced voices: those who are strongly associated with Iran and Arab countries and shows how geopolitically hegemonic sites of knowledge production act as barriers against the formation of an in-between discursive space. |
URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/11375/28234 |
Appears in Collections: | Open Access Dissertations and Theses |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
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KarimiPour_Kosar_202212_PhD.pdf | 4.6 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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