Political science is the scientific study of politics. It is a social science dealing with systems of governance and power, and the analysis of political activities, political institutions, political thought and behavior, and associated constitutions and laws.
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, which along with grammar and logic, is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. Rhetoric aims to study the techniques writers or speakers utilize to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. Aristotle defines rhetoric as "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion" and since mastery of the art was necessary for victory in a case at law, for passage of proposals in the assembly, or for fame as a speaker in civic ceremonies, he calls it "a combination of the science of logic and of the ethical branch of politics". Rhetoric typically provides heuristics for understanding, discovering, and developing arguments for particular situations, such as Aristotle's three persuasive audience appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos. The five canons of rhetoric or phases of developing a persuasive speech were first codified in classical Rome: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.
Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and regulation over public and private life. It is regarded as the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism. In totalitarian states, political power is often held by autocrats, such as dictators and absolute monarchs, who employ all-encompassing campaigns in which propaganda is broadcast by state-controlled mass media in order to control the citizenry.
A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or objects, performed according to a set sequence. Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized, but not defined, by formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism, and performance.
Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research that involves examining the behavior of the participants in a given social situation and understanding the group members' own interpretation of such behavior.
Not to be confused with Secularism
Clifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology and who was considered "for three decades... the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States." He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
James C. Scott is an American political scientist and anthropologist specializing in comparative politics. He is a comparative scholar of agrarian and non-state societies, subaltern politics, and anarchism. His primary research has centered on peasants of Southeast Asia and their strategies of resistance to various forms of domination. The New York Times described his research as "highly influential and idiosyncratic".
Michael Burawoy is a sociologist working within Marxist social theory, best known as the leading proponent of public sociology and the author of Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism—a study on the sociology of industry that has been translated into a number of languages.
Feminist anthropology is a four-field approach to anthropology that seeks to transform research findings, anthropological hiring practices, and the scholarly production of knowledge, using insights from feminist theory. Simultaneously, feminist anthropology challenges essentialist feminist theories developed in Europe and America. While feminists practiced cultural anthropology since its inception, it was not until the 1970s that feminist anthropology was formally recognized as a subdiscipline of anthropology. Since then, it has developed its own subsection of the American Anthropological Association – the Association for Feminist Anthropology – and its own publication, Feminist Anthropology. Their former journal Voices is now defunct.
Sana'a Mehaidli was a member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party who, at the age of 16 blew herself and a Peugeot filled with explosives up next to an Israeli convoy in Jezzine, Lebanon, during the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon. Twelve Israeli soldiers were killed and ten were injured.
Mohammad Malas is a prominent Syrian filmmaker. Malas directed several documentary and feature films that garnered international recognition. He is among the first auteur filmmakers in Syrian cinema.
The Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party – Syria Region, officially the Syrian Regional Branch, is a neo-Ba'athist organisation founded on 7 April 1947 by Michel Aflaq, Salah al-Din al-Bitar and followers of Zaki al-Arsuzi. The party has ruled Syria continuously since the 1963 Syrian coup d'état which brought the Ba'athists to power. It was first the regional branch of the original Ba'ath Party (1947–1966) before it changed its allegiance to the Syrian-dominated Ba'ath movement (1966–present) following the 1966 split within the original Ba'ath Party. Since their ascent to power in 1963, neo-Ba'athist officers proceeded by stamping out the traditional civilian elites to construct a military dictatorship operating in totalitarian lines; wherein all state agencies, party organisations, public institutions, civil entities, media and health infrastructure are tightly dominated by the army establishment, deep state, and the Mukhabarat.
The Gordon J. Laing Award is conferred annually, by the University of Chicago's Board of University Publications, on the faculty author, editor, or translator whose book has brought the greatest distinction to the list of the University of Chicago Press. The first award was given in 1963 and the most recent award was given on May 17, 2022, to Lisa Wedeen, the Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago.
Tishreen is one of the state-owned Arabic daily newspapers published in Syria. The daily is based in Damascus and has been in circulation since 1975. Tishreen was named after the Arab-Israeli war in October 1973.
A critical theory is any approach to social philosophy that focuses on society and culture to attempt to reveal, critique, and challenge power structures. With roots in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems stem more from social structures and cultural assumptions than from individuals. It argues that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation. Critical theory finds applications in various fields of study, including psychoanalysis, sociology, history, communication theory, philosophy and feminist theory.
Sonja K. Foss is a rhetorical scholar and educator in the discipline of communication. Her research and teaching interests are in contemporary rhetorical theory and criticism, feminist perspectives on communication, the incorporation of marginalized voices into rhetorical theory and practice, and visual rhetoric.
Post-Islamism is a neologism in political science, the definition and applicability of which is disputed. Asef Bayat and Olivier Roy are among the main architects of the idea.
David D. Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science in the School of Humanities and Science at Stanford University. He is a comparative politics scholar who has written works on civil war, ethnic identity, culture and nationalism. He is known for his application of rational choice to the study of ethnic conflict, and for bridging a gap between ethnography and rational choice.
Harvey D. Wedeen was an American classical pianist and piano teacher. He served as the chair of the keyboard department at the Boyer College of Music and Dance at Temple University in Philadelphia for 51 years until 2012. Wedeen's early musical training includes piano studies with renowned French pianists Robert Casadesus and Gaby Casadesus, as well as music theory and composition studies with legendary French composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher Nadia Boulanger. After receiving a degree in French literature at Columbia University, he studied under the tutelage of Adele Marcus at the Juilliard School, obtaining a master's degree in piano performance in 1951. Wedeen began to teach at Temple University in 1964, and he played a vital role in establishing and developing the performance, pedagogy, and early music programs at the keyboard department at Temple. Musicians he recruited to the keyboard department include classical pianists Lambert Orkis, Alexander Fiorillo, and harpsichordist and early music scholar Joyce Lindorff. He retired in 2012 and continued to teach shortly before his death. His notable students include Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin, American pianist Charles Abramovic, Durch/Israeli pianist and early keyboard performer Michael Tsalka, Canadian pianist Marc Durand, and Italian-American pianist Robert Durso.
