College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item Where in the world is my tweet: Detecting irregular removal patterns on Twitter(PLoS, 2018-09-20) Timoneda, Joan C.Twitter data are becoming an important part of modern political science research, but key aspects of the inner workings of Twitter streams as well as self-censorship on the platform require further research. A particularly important research agenda is to understand removal rates of politically charged tweets. In this article, I provide a strategy to understand removal rates on Twitter, particularly on politically charged topics. First, the technical properties of Twitter's API that may distort the analyses of removal rates are tested. Results show that the forward stream does not capture every possible tweet -between 2 and 5 percent of tweets are lost on average, even when the volume of tweets is low and the firehose not needed. Second, data from Twitter's streams are collected on contentious topics such as terrorism or political leaders and non-contentious topics such as types of food. The statistical technique used to detect uncommon removal rate patterns is multilevel analysis. Results show significant differences in the removal of tweets between different topic groups. This article provides the first systematic comparison of information loss and removal on Twitter as well as a strategy to collect valid removal samples of tweets.Item Service, Sacrifice, and Citizenship: The Experiences of Muslims Serving in the U.S. Military(2013) Sandhoff, Michelle; Segal, David R; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The events of 9/11 and the subsequent "War on Terror" activated long standing stereotypes in the United States that portrayed Muslims as fundamentally different from other Americans. In this project, I interview 15 Muslims who have served in the U.S. military since 9/11 to determine if and how the activation of this us/them boundary shaped their military experiences. I find that the us/them atmosphere that characterizes civilian discourse about Muslims is present in the military. However, most of my respondents felt that it had little practical effect on them. I discuss this in terms of the presence but irrelevance of this boundary. I connect this finding to the history of racial integration in the U.S. military, arguing that characteristics of the military, including an emphasis on policies of equal opportunity, the ability to compel certain behaviors, and the nature of military service, which promotes close contact among diverse individuals, can mitigate some of the negatives effects of being othered. While most of my respondents had positive experiences, in some units the us/them discourse was exacerbated, creating atmospheres of distrust and suspicion which led to negative outcomes including harassment, accusations, and decisions by Muslim service members to leave the military. A theme that emerged in exploring this dichotomy of experience among my respondents was the role of leadership. Leadership that saw value in diversity and was invested in supporting it, mitigated negative effects of othering, making this an irrelevant frame. However, leadership that repeated stereotypes or fears reinforced this tension, creating toxic environments in which Muslim service members felt excluded. I began this project with the expectation that citizenship would be a central narrative for Muslim service members, as it was for Japanese Americans in World War II. However, the respondents in my sample rarely use their military service to directly make claims on citizenship. They do however express institutional motivations to serve and engage in dialogue, bridge building, and other aspects of everyday citizenship.Item The Political Struggles of the Ulama of Dar-ul-Uloom Deoband: Identifying and Operationalizing the Traditionalist Approach to Politics(2005-12-13) Hamid, Myra; Glass, James; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This paper uses the example of the political struggles of the religious scholars (ulama) of Dar-ul-Uloom Deoband, a highly influential Islamic seminary founded in North India in the 19th century in the wake of Muslim defeat in the Mutiny of 1857 against the British, to identify the salient features of the traditionalist approach to politics and examine how this approach can be operationalized. The paper compares the traditionalist orientation to politics, which the school at Deoband and the movement that emerged from there came to represent, with modernist and fundamentalist/Islamist approaches. It proposes that the understudied but extremely important traditionalist paradigm provides the basis for more creative, balanced, fruitful, and Islamically authentic political engagement than either of the two opposing trends popular in the Muslim world today.