(A) Semiotic Study on Tourism and Conservation at Stonehenge, UNESCO World Heritage Site

Molaei, Pari 경희대학교 대학원 2020 국내박사

Stonehenge, a popular visitor attraction and the icon of Britishness is a renowned world heritage site. This interdisciplinary research, based on visual methodology explored Stonehenge’s status at the current time through pictorial representations by its contemporary visitors and authorities. Therefore, this study relied on visual data for this purpose. In this dissertation, a review of activities of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and its advisory bodies for preserving cultural and natural heritage sites was conducted to have a better understanding of the scope of their supervision and management of the status World Heritage Sites have today. Stonehenge was selected as the case study to discuss the issues associated to World Heritage Sites in general and to this site, in particular. A set of visual data of more than 3000 images of Stonehenge from four web-based sources namely, Google images, TripAdvisor, Instagram, and Flickr, were collected for this purpose. Images were categorized denotatively and were backed up by connotatively interpreted sign elements in the photographs. To support the arguments in this study, analyzation of websites, blogs, and the final typology of the images that represent the site was conducted and represented as well. The images typology revealed that non-tourists and non-touristic activities (solstice rituals) subject is more dominant among other subjects that represent the site. Other important themes were Stonehenge and tourists. Findings of this research, through semiotic analysis of images of Stonehenge, supported the previous studies that questioned the nature of World Heritage status and whether universality or national embodiment of World Heritage Sites is more resonant in today’s perception of World Heritage Sites. In addition, another result of this semiotics study was to identify the role web-based media, social networks, and UGC sources have ix in representing Stonehenge as a heritage site. The typology of the websites (adapted from Google images) was a great help in knowing what groups with what policies and tendencies are contributing to representing this monument. With referencing to this research’s questions, those subjects that represent Stonehenge prominently based on the images and from non-experts’ perspective were found. Stonehenge mainly has been represented as a national icon, national identity, Englishness icon, and symbol of the UK. Stonehenge is also a sacred place to modern pagans/religious minorities in the UK, and a tourist attraction to (non-native) tourists. However, an ongoing conflict between pagans and heritage authorities over Stonehenge’s ownership exist but officials show their supremacy (Fowler, 1987) over the other by publicizing and managing the solstices through official channels.

Reading lolita in tehran : gender and representation in azar nafisi's neo-orientalist memoir

Molaei, Pari 경희대학교 일반대학원 2015 국내석사

Azar Nafisi’s memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, was published in 2003 and spawned many positive reviews. The work has been acclaimed by critics and readers for its narration of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, and the method in which she artfully interweaves past and present events. The memoir however, received many negative responses from both Iranian and non-Iranian critics for being one-sided in her portrayal of Iran’s internal issues. Because of the memoir’s popularity in America and its misrepresentation of Iran, underestimating feminism and women’s role in Islamic Republic of Iran, thereby overlooking the positive aspects of life in Iran, while extolling the dominant American ideology, many critics have argued that Nafisi’s memoir is a “Neo-Orientalist” work. The unique feature of Reading Lolita in Tehran is not the way the author appropriates Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and other famous literary works but rather how these works shed light on the special conditions of life in Tehran, the capital city of Iran. What attracts her are the memories from the experience of reading, analyzing, and discussing Lolita, Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby and other famous works in literature while in Tehran. As the author makes it explicit, her memoir “is the story of Lolita in Tehran, how Lolita gave a different color to Tehran, and how Tehran helped redefine Nabokov’s novel, turning it into this Lolita, our Lolita” (Nafisi 6). By studying critics' reviews of Nafisi’s work, this paper examines the concept of Orientalism and neo-Orientalism and highlights the relevance of these ideological notions in Nafisi’s memoir and its popularity among Western readers as well as to know why her memoir has garnered the epithet “Neo-Orientalist” by her critics in first chapter. In second chapter, this paper will address some social issues of pre-revolutionary Iran like Westernization and religion which actuated people to the revolution. Also, this paper will lead readers to see the differences between pre- and post-revolutionary Iran and how the US’s approach toward Iran has changed after the Islamic Revolution and what were the reasons that before the Islamic Revolution Iran was pro-Western and America was Iran’s supporter. In third chapter, Iranian women’s role in the society like feminism activities, women’s movement and education which are almost absent in Nafisi’s memoir will be further elaborated. In conclusion, this thesis will address memoir genre very briefly and points out to Nafisi’s recent published works after Reading Lolita in Tehran’s publication.

Sensing and Imaging Using Multi-dimensionality Coded Compressive Material

Molaei, Ali ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Northeastern Unive 2019 해외박사(DDOD)

Reducing the cost of electromagnetic sensing and imaging systems is a necessity before they can be far and widely established as a part of an extensive network of radars. Conventional imaging systems seek to reconstruct a target in the imaging domain by employing many transmitting and receiving antenna elements. These systems are suboptimal, due to the often large mutual information existing between successive measurements. This thesis describes a new sensing technique, which is based on the use of a novel compressive reflector antenna (CRA), that is capable of providing high sensing capacity in different sensing applications. The high sensing capacity provided by the CRA enhances the information transfer efficiency from the sensing system to the imaging domain and vice versa. Thus, complexity and cost of the hardware architecture can be drastically reduced. The CRA generates spatial codes in the imaging domain, which are dynamically changed through the excitation of Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) feeding arrays. In order to increase the sensing capacity of the CRA even further, frequency dispersive metamaterials can be designed to coat the surface of the CRA, which ultimately produce spectral codes in near- and far- field of the reflector. This thesis describes different concepts of operation, in which a multi-dimensionality coded compressive system can be used to perform sensing and imaging. The proposed sensing technique, which may be used for imaging applications, is based on norm-1 regularized iterative Compressive Sensing (CS) algorithms. In this thesis, we also present the mathematical formulation that describes the properties of the spatial and spectral codes produced by the CRA that will be used to perform quasi-real-time imaging. The content outlined in this thesis leverages advances from multi-scale wave propagation, sparse data signal processing, information coding and distributed computing. The result will enhance the efficiency and reliability of the current beamforming systems by using novel Compressive Sensors made of traditional metallic and dielectric structures, as well as novel metamaterials and metasurfaces.