Pakistan journal of international affairs, Dec 20, 2023
This research investigates the working conditions and challenges faced by local journalists in th... more This research investigates the working conditions and challenges faced by local journalists in the Swat district of Pakistan amidst periods of violence, focusing on incidents such as military operations and suicide bombings by the Taliban. Through interviews with journalists in the region, the study explores how they navigate the complexities of reporting traumatic events while grappling with physical and emotional strain. Employing Pierre Bourdieu's Field Theory, the research analyzes journalists' strategies for accessing conflict zones safely and ensuring the journalistic principles of objectivity and fairness. Using concepts like Capital, Habitus, and Doxa, the study situates journalists within the volatile social landscape to highlight the interconnectedness of their professional and personal spheres. Despite possessing cultural and social capital, journalists face significant risks to their safety while fulfilling their reporting duties in dangerous environments.
Journal of humanities, social and management sciences, Dec 31, 2023
This study uses a phenomenological perspective supported by Foucault's 'hermeneutics of the self'... more This study uses a phenomenological perspective supported by Foucault's 'hermeneutics of the self' to analyse Anatole France's novel Thaïs. The novel narrates the story of a Christian hermit, Paphnutius, and a courtesan, Thaïs. Living an abstemious life in the desert and reflecting on his sins of the past, Paphnutius recalls having met a delightful actress, Thaïs and how she seduced men, including him, into the sins of the flesh. Taken in by his exhortations, she leaves all her wealth and possessions and follows the monk to attain eternal beauty and bliss. Paphnutius successfully converts Thaïs to the courtesan before she dies as a 'purified' soul. However, after her conversion, Thaïs's desire and love afflict Paphnutius, who ends up doubting the truth of his faith. When he comes to know that Thaïs is on her deathbed, he starts having doubts about the reality of death and hence of God/his belief. We attempt to add a theoretically driven analysis and set forth a few observations. This paper argues that Thaïs is the story of complex human interactions revolving around the axes of truth and subjectivity and provides an excellent narration of the aesthetics of existence in the pagan and early Christian world.
Based on in-depth interviews with ethnic Pashtun war journalists, this study explores the cross-b... more Based on in-depth interviews with ethnic Pashtun war journalists, this study explores the cross-border news practices and its underlying economy in Pakistan's troubled tribal region that straddles the Pak-Afghan border. We argue that the structural remnants, including media, of the British colonialism of the past continue to boost the neo-imperialism of the present. Several studies have examined the war reporting in the Pak-Afghan border space, however, the intersection of the postcolonial State, militarization, and cross-border news labor practices is understudied. Backdropped in the critical examination of the news pursuits during the two wars: the Afghan "jihad" and the US-led "war on terror," we show how war a s business and news labor as commodity feed into each other and contribute to the making of a material and representational crisis which sustains what Jasbir Puar calls the "economy of injury." KEYWORDS Pashtun necropolitics news practices deathscapes imperialist wars Taliban [Q1] Pakistan's mostly barren and desolate but intermittently strewn with lavish valleys-Pashtun tribal region that falls alongside Afghanistan has acquired a phenomenal strategic value over the past few centuries. Caught in the geopolitical power-plays of global empires and regional contestants, this cross-border region's rocky geography, and its peoples' tribal ways of life and their symbolic architecture of meaning-making have been in constant wrestling with colonial and imperial forces. News production and its labor practices are no exception. Starting from 1980s, these "ungoverned" spaces have become a site of unique and hazardous cross-border news-gathering practices. With the bordering city of Peshawar as its initial news center, this cross-border journalism has felt its global presence, and played a significant role in making the region in the current formation-a war zone. In post-9/11 context, the US-led "war on terror" against Al-Qaida, coinciding with the privatization of airwaves in Pakistan, turned the cross-border violence into a staple diet of 24/7 commercial news cycle. In pursuit of coveted news, almost every elite global media outlet, such as the US-based CNN, NYT, and CNBC; Japan-based NHK; and Qatari-owned Al-Jazeera, also sent their single or even multiple teams to Pakistan. Similarly, global wire services like Agency France Presse (AFP), Reuters, and Associated Press (AP)-already operating in the federal capital (Islamabad) ever since the Afghan war era (1980s)also opened their makeshift offices in Peshawar. It started from the hiring of the local Pashtun journalists in lowly positions
Journal of Peace, Development and Communication, 2024
This research theorizes health communication within the culture centered approach, to explore cul... more This research theorizes health communication within the culture centered approach, to explore cultural dynamics of public health emergencies like Poliomyelitis (Polio)-a highly contagious and incurable viral disease. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) was launched in 1988 globally to eradicate poliovirus from the last two endemic countries-Pakistan and Afghanistan but facing serious challenges. Twenty-seven semi-structured in-depth interviews with ethnic Pashtun parents-refusal cases, from three high risk districts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan were conducted; analyzed using constructivists grounded theory to explore how the life experiences of these cultural participants shape their understanding of health, consequently, make decisions regarding immunization of their children against poliovirus. Resultantly, four concepts emerged: honoring familial hierarchy, alternative medicine, religion, and forced compliance. The findings of the research endorse necessity of dialogue and participation within health communication strategies supporting the alternative dimension, validates foregrounding and integrating culture at all stages of program development while addressing health crises. Cultural beliefs and values create strategic influences thereby shaping a sympathetic environment for [health] promotion and interventions programs.
This research investigates the working conditions and challenges faced by local journalists in th... more This research investigates the working conditions and challenges faced by local journalists in the Swat district of Pakistan amidst periods of violence, focusing on incidents such as military operations and suicide bombings by the Taliban. Through interviews with journalists in the region, the study explores how they navigate the complexities of reporting traumatic events while grappling with physical and emotional strain. Employing Pierre Bourdieu's Field Theory, the research analyzes journalists' strategies for accessing conflict zones safely and ensuring the journalistic principles of objectivity and fairness. Using concepts like Capital, Habitus, and Doxa, the study situates journalists within the volatile social landscape to highlight the interconnectedness of their professional and personal spheres. Despite possessing cultural and social capital, journalists face significant risks to their safety while fulfilling their reporting duties in dangerous environments.
This study uses a phenomenological perspective supported by Foucault's 'hermeneutics of the self'... more This study uses a phenomenological perspective supported by Foucault's 'hermeneutics of the self' to analyse Anatole France's novel Thaïs. The novel narrates the story of a Christian hermit, Paphnutius, and a courtesan, Thaïs. Living an abstemious life in the desert and reflecting on his sins of the past, Paphnutius recalls having met a delightful actress, Thaïs and how she seduced men, including him, into the sins of the flesh. Taken in by his exhortations, she leaves all her wealth and possessions and follows the monk to attain eternal beauty and bliss. Paphnutius successfully converts Thaïs to the courtesan before she dies as a 'purified' soul. However, after her conversion, Thaïs's desire and love afflict Paphnutius, who ends up doubting the truth of his faith. When he comes to know that Thaïs is on her deathbed, he starts having doubts about the reality of death and hence of God/his belief. We attempt to add a theoretically driven analysis and set forth a few observations. This paper argues that Thaïs is the story of complex human interactions revolving around the axes of truth and subjectivity and provides an excellent narration of the aesthetics of existence in the pagan and early Christian world.
Liberal Arts & Social Sciences International Journal (LASSIJ), 2023
After taking over Kabul for the second time when the US-led NATO forces left Afghanistan in 2021,... more After taking over Kabul for the second time when the US-led NATO forces left Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban resumed their past practices. To run the affairs of Afghanistan, the Taliban use political Islam, the way they understand and interpret it, as the nodal point around which they articulate the signs and symbols in a chain of equivalence. This paper analyses the Taliban's policies regarding Afghanistan's historical, national, and cultural symbols. Using epistemicide as an analytical device, we argue that in the name of Puritanism and the reconstitution of Afghanistan, according to Sharia, the Taliban discovered and erased all symbols of historical Afghanistan. This tends to serve as a case of epistemicide of the Afghan culture and wipes the slate of Afghan history clean. This paper explains how the Taliban silenced, devalued, and consequently moved to eradicate Afghanistan's cultural memory and knowledge system. This paper provides an account of what the Taliban's policies convey by silencing Afghanistan's historical texts, histories, and narratives. The Afghan society is faced with internal colonisation, which refuses that knowledge production is a social practice that takes into cognisance the history and culture of the Afghan people, among other factors.
Journal of Journalism, Media Science & Creative Arts, 2023
This paper examines local journalists' practices and routines in a state of war in the Swat distr... more This paper examines local journalists' practices and routines in a state of war in the Swat district of Pakistan. In the backdrop of the U.S.-led "war on terror," Pakistan launched lingering 'counter-terror operations' targeting a militant network called the Taliban. Based on in-depth interviews with journalists in Swat and its surrounding troubled districts, this research investigates the challenges local journalists went through while reporting death and destruction. It investigates how local journalists dealt with the trauma of visceral violence in their local, national, and international media coverage. Using Pierre Bourdieu's Field Theory, especially its concepts of 'capital', 'habitus', and 'doxa', this research situates journalists and their routines at the center of troubled social life without distinguishing between the professional world and the newsroom from the community and its challenges. The paper argues that these journalists possess enough cultural and social capital; however, reporting was a challenging task as these journalists compromised journalistic principles of neutrality, objectivity, and professionalism.
Based on in-depth interviews with ethnic Pashtun war journalists, this study explores the cross-b... more Based on in-depth interviews with ethnic Pashtun war journalists, this study explores the cross-border news practices and its underlying economy in Pakistan's troubled tribal region that straddles the Pak-Afghan border. We argue that the structural remnants, including media, of the British colonialism of the past continue to boost the neo-imperialism of the present. Several studies have examined the war reporting in the Pak-Afghan border space, however, the intersection of the postcolonial State, militarization, and cross-border news labor practices is understudied. Backdropped in the critical examination of the news pursuits during the two wars: the Afghan "jihad" and the US-led "war on terror," we show how war as business and news labor as commodity feed into each other and contribute to the making of a material and representational crisis which sustains what Jasbir Puar calls the "economy of injury." ARTICLE HISTORY
Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, Oct 17, 2020
This study sought to examine work-related exposure to trauma and predictors of Post-Traumatic Str... more This study sought to examine work-related exposure to trauma and predictors of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms among regional journalists in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, a conflict-ridden area in northwest Pakistan. We recruited 216 KP journalists. Analysis of the surveys revealed a high prevalence of trauma exposure and PTSD symptoms. All of the participants had covered at least one trauma inducing event. Exposure to work-related trauma, active emotional coping and avoidant emotional coping were statistically significant factors associated with PTSD symptoms. This study is the first to highlight the severity of the impact of trauma on regional journalists in Pakistan.
For the last four decades, Pakistan’s northwestern Pashtun tribal areas have been in a constant s... more For the last four decades, Pakistan’s northwestern Pashtun tribal areas have been in a constant state of imperialist wars. In reaction to this organized violence, a local civil rights movement, the PTM, emerged in 2014 which powerfully challenged the military’s discursive regime that legitimates these US-led wars. However, the military challenged the movement’s call for justice by launching a concerted discursive drive to construct an enemy image of the PTM. This study aims to discover how the military constructs the identity, as well as the cultural and political meanings of the movement. The authors found that the military strategically organizes its discourse to first build a symbolic order in which an enemy other, less than human, is created, and then its oppression is normalized and made invisible. They hope that the article contributes to the current critical scholarship on the increasing militarization of contemporary public spaces and democratic cultures, particularly in the...
For the last five decades, a neoliberal war has been raging through Pakistan’s Pashtun Tribal Are... more For the last five decades, a neoliberal war has been raging through Pakistan’s Pashtun Tribal Areas bordering Afghanistan. The State of Pakistan has been an active shareholder in this never-ending “war on terror.” The State’s biopolitical and racializing policies continuously reproduce the logics through which the Tribal bodies are conveniently and invisibly subjected to a regime of death and maiming. In an attempt to unsettle the State’s biopolitical mandate, we combine Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics to map out the historical genealogy of the imperialist violence in the Tribal border zone. Next, we delineate and examine three major State-deployed discursive strategies through which the exceptional position of this Tribal borderspace and the expendable status of its inhabitants are constructed and naturalized. Towards the end, we also discuss PTM, a grassroots civil rights anti-war movement that is mounting a notable resistance to the necropolitical regime through a non-violent praxis rooted in Pashtun cultural traditions of resistance. The PTM, we conclude, offers an organic counter-Pashtun narrative to the world. The aim of the paper is to stimulate indigenous emancipatory perspectives in the academic literature on the Pashtun Tribal Areas and its people.
For the last five decades, a neoliberal war has been raging through Pakistan’s Pashtun Tribal Are... more For the last five decades, a neoliberal war has been raging through Pakistan’s Pashtun Tribal Areas bordering Afghanistan. The State of Pakistan has been an active shareholder in this never-ending “war on terror.” The State’s biopolitical and racializing policies continuously reproduce the logics through which the Tribal bodies are conveniently and invisibly subjected to a regime of death and maiming. In an attempt to unsettle the State’s biopolitical mandate, we combine Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics to map out the historical genealogy of the imperialist violence in the Tribal border zone. Next, we delineate and examine three major State-deployed discursive strategies through which the exceptional position of this Tribal borderspace and the expendable status of its inhabitants are constructed and naturalized. Towards the end, we also discuss PTM, a grassroots civil rights anti-war movement that is mounting a notable resistance to the necropolitical regime through a non-violent praxis rooted in Pashtun cultural traditions of resistance. The PTM, we conclude, offers an organic counter-Pashtun narrative to the world. The aim of the paper is to stimulate indigenous emancipatory perspectives in the academic literature on the Pashtun Tribal Areas and its people.
Journal of Journalism, Media Science & Creative Arts
This paper analyzes “Pakhto Voices” project run by Public Engagement Policy Lab., a U.K.-based no... more This paper analyzes “Pakhto Voices” project run by Public Engagement Policy Lab., a U.K.-based non-governmental organization, in the light of Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) principles and approaches. The main purpose of the project is to reduce health disparities among the people of the then Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA—now called Tribal Districts or Merged Districts) of Pakistan through a “community-based research project.” According to World Health Organization (WHO), Pakistan is one of the three remaining polio-endemic countries in the world, along with Afghanistan and Nigeria. More than half of the polio cases emerged from the Tribal Districts where people from Pakhtun ethnic group reside. The formative research design of the project employed a fusion of unobtrusive and obtrusive quantitative, qualitative and ethnographic methods. The formative research design had three components: Content Analysis; Citizen Consultation, and SMS data gathering program...
This paper investigates the discourse of public hanging of rapists on the social media space, tha... more This paper investigates the discourse of public hanging of rapists on the social media space, that is, Twitter in Pakistan. It also examines how this discourse is interdiscursively related to the power relations particularly implicated in the discourses on religion and gender and the possible effects of this discursive struggle on society. By employing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) for analysis, this research uses Laclau and Mouffe's Discourse Theory as theoretical framework. We conclude that the discourse approving death by hanging for the rapists is a device to propagate the power and the fear of the State. It has a "repetition induced effect" and implies sovereign's exception; and women are silenced in their demands for justice against the patriarchal social structures which are responsible for crime against women's body. It also reifies the patriarchal structures and controls societies through vengeance rather than reformative justice.
Liberal Arts and Social Sciences International Journal (LASSIJ)
This paper is a qualitative thematic analysis of Hermann Hesse’s novel Narcissus and Goldmund wit... more This paper is a qualitative thematic analysis of Hermann Hesse’s novel Narcissus and Goldmund with a cross-cultural theory framework, buttressed with concepts from Jungian psychology. The novel narrates the story of two medieval priests who are the exact opposite of but emotionally attached to each other. The paper demonstrates how various cultural themes that Hesse has engaged can shed light on the ways Western and Eastern societies make sense of the Self, the Other, and the everyday existential dilemmas. Based on Jungian psychology, we argue that Narcissus and Goldmund are not two distinct characters; instead, they are two aspects of the Self. The social construction of these two characters is the symbolic representation of the struggle to attain the deeper meanings of the Self. This struggle, what Jung called individuation, is the journey of the human soul into its own deepest spheres. Moreover, we note that the matrix of Hesse’s thought is the European interest in the Orient. Na...
Having established its economic power globally, China is now also asserting its soft power in the... more Having established its economic power globally, China is now also asserting its soft power in the international symbolic representational realm-largely dominated by the West. This paper critically evaluates how BBC discursively constructs China in its Online English and Urdu News, and discusses its attendant social, political, and economic implications for the Chinese and Pakistani citizens in particular, and for people all over the world. We also discuss how does the West perceive China's efforts to establish a global soft image and what role BBC plays in it. Using a combination of research tools; Framing, Authorship and Sourcing, the study analyzed 115 news stories. The analysis revealed that 'China-Threat' is the dominant frame in BBC's coverage of China. Second, all stories were written by correspondents stationed outside China. Finally, BBC disproportionately cited Western news/expert sources, and also many sources/reports were unspecified (anonymous). The aim of this paper is to prompt readers to question commonly held assumptions of China propagated mostly by Western media.
This paper investigates the discourse of public hanging of rapists on the social media space, tha... more This paper investigates the discourse of public hanging of rapists on the social media space, that is, Twitter in Pakistan. It also examines how this discourse is interdiscursively related to the power relations particularly implicated in the discourses on religion and gender and the possible effects of this discursive struggle on society. By employing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) for analysis, this research uses Laclau and Mouffe's Discourse Theory as theoretical framework. We conclude that the discourse approving death by hanging for the rapists is a device to propagate the power and the fear of the State. It has a "repetition induced effect" and implies sovereign's exception; and women are silenced in their demands for justice against the patriarchal social structures which are responsible for crime against women's body. It also reifies the patriarchal structures and controls societies through vengeance rather than reformative justice.
This research study is designed to understand reporting traumatic incidents in Pakistani media an... more This research study is designed to understand reporting traumatic incidents in Pakistani media and the individual level factors that influence a journalist's decision while covering a traumatic incident and his/her decision of selecting information to include in or exclude from news. This study uses a qualitative research design to analyze the research question. The researcher used in-depth interviews with journalists in Peshawar and Tribal Districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Thirty journalists were recruited (news reporters, editors and photographers) working for media (print, broadcast and online), whose primary beat is 'crime' or "violent events" along with other beats. The participants of the study were selected by purposive and snowball sampling techniques. Thematic Analysis as a method was used to analyze the data, i.e., interviews with journalists. The data was examined through the lens of the Hierarchy of Influences Model (HOI), which is an extension of the Gatekeeping Theory. The findings show that education, training, experience, focus on crime and conflict, newsworthiness of the story, self-promotion, and Job security influence a journalist's decision while covering a traumatic incident in Pakistani media.
Pakistan journal of international affairs, Dec 20, 2023
This research investigates the working conditions and challenges faced by local journalists in th... more This research investigates the working conditions and challenges faced by local journalists in the Swat district of Pakistan amidst periods of violence, focusing on incidents such as military operations and suicide bombings by the Taliban. Through interviews with journalists in the region, the study explores how they navigate the complexities of reporting traumatic events while grappling with physical and emotional strain. Employing Pierre Bourdieu's Field Theory, the research analyzes journalists' strategies for accessing conflict zones safely and ensuring the journalistic principles of objectivity and fairness. Using concepts like Capital, Habitus, and Doxa, the study situates journalists within the volatile social landscape to highlight the interconnectedness of their professional and personal spheres. Despite possessing cultural and social capital, journalists face significant risks to their safety while fulfilling their reporting duties in dangerous environments.
Journal of humanities, social and management sciences, Dec 31, 2023
This study uses a phenomenological perspective supported by Foucault's 'hermeneutics of the self'... more This study uses a phenomenological perspective supported by Foucault's 'hermeneutics of the self' to analyse Anatole France's novel Thaïs. The novel narrates the story of a Christian hermit, Paphnutius, and a courtesan, Thaïs. Living an abstemious life in the desert and reflecting on his sins of the past, Paphnutius recalls having met a delightful actress, Thaïs and how she seduced men, including him, into the sins of the flesh. Taken in by his exhortations, she leaves all her wealth and possessions and follows the monk to attain eternal beauty and bliss. Paphnutius successfully converts Thaïs to the courtesan before she dies as a 'purified' soul. However, after her conversion, Thaïs's desire and love afflict Paphnutius, who ends up doubting the truth of his faith. When he comes to know that Thaïs is on her deathbed, he starts having doubts about the reality of death and hence of God/his belief. We attempt to add a theoretically driven analysis and set forth a few observations. This paper argues that Thaïs is the story of complex human interactions revolving around the axes of truth and subjectivity and provides an excellent narration of the aesthetics of existence in the pagan and early Christian world.
Based on in-depth interviews with ethnic Pashtun war journalists, this study explores the cross-b... more Based on in-depth interviews with ethnic Pashtun war journalists, this study explores the cross-border news practices and its underlying economy in Pakistan's troubled tribal region that straddles the Pak-Afghan border. We argue that the structural remnants, including media, of the British colonialism of the past continue to boost the neo-imperialism of the present. Several studies have examined the war reporting in the Pak-Afghan border space, however, the intersection of the postcolonial State, militarization, and cross-border news labor practices is understudied. Backdropped in the critical examination of the news pursuits during the two wars: the Afghan "jihad" and the US-led "war on terror," we show how war a s business and news labor as commodity feed into each other and contribute to the making of a material and representational crisis which sustains what Jasbir Puar calls the "economy of injury." KEYWORDS Pashtun necropolitics news practices deathscapes imperialist wars Taliban [Q1] Pakistan's mostly barren and desolate but intermittently strewn with lavish valleys-Pashtun tribal region that falls alongside Afghanistan has acquired a phenomenal strategic value over the past few centuries. Caught in the geopolitical power-plays of global empires and regional contestants, this cross-border region's rocky geography, and its peoples' tribal ways of life and their symbolic architecture of meaning-making have been in constant wrestling with colonial and imperial forces. News production and its labor practices are no exception. Starting from 1980s, these "ungoverned" spaces have become a site of unique and hazardous cross-border news-gathering practices. With the bordering city of Peshawar as its initial news center, this cross-border journalism has felt its global presence, and played a significant role in making the region in the current formation-a war zone. In post-9/11 context, the US-led "war on terror" against Al-Qaida, coinciding with the privatization of airwaves in Pakistan, turned the cross-border violence into a staple diet of 24/7 commercial news cycle. In pursuit of coveted news, almost every elite global media outlet, such as the US-based CNN, NYT, and CNBC; Japan-based NHK; and Qatari-owned Al-Jazeera, also sent their single or even multiple teams to Pakistan. Similarly, global wire services like Agency France Presse (AFP), Reuters, and Associated Press (AP)-already operating in the federal capital (Islamabad) ever since the Afghan war era (1980s)also opened their makeshift offices in Peshawar. It started from the hiring of the local Pashtun journalists in lowly positions
Journal of Peace, Development and Communication, 2024
This research theorizes health communication within the culture centered approach, to explore cul... more This research theorizes health communication within the culture centered approach, to explore cultural dynamics of public health emergencies like Poliomyelitis (Polio)-a highly contagious and incurable viral disease. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) was launched in 1988 globally to eradicate poliovirus from the last two endemic countries-Pakistan and Afghanistan but facing serious challenges. Twenty-seven semi-structured in-depth interviews with ethnic Pashtun parents-refusal cases, from three high risk districts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan were conducted; analyzed using constructivists grounded theory to explore how the life experiences of these cultural participants shape their understanding of health, consequently, make decisions regarding immunization of their children against poliovirus. Resultantly, four concepts emerged: honoring familial hierarchy, alternative medicine, religion, and forced compliance. The findings of the research endorse necessity of dialogue and participation within health communication strategies supporting the alternative dimension, validates foregrounding and integrating culture at all stages of program development while addressing health crises. Cultural beliefs and values create strategic influences thereby shaping a sympathetic environment for [health] promotion and interventions programs.
This research investigates the working conditions and challenges faced by local journalists in th... more This research investigates the working conditions and challenges faced by local journalists in the Swat district of Pakistan amidst periods of violence, focusing on incidents such as military operations and suicide bombings by the Taliban. Through interviews with journalists in the region, the study explores how they navigate the complexities of reporting traumatic events while grappling with physical and emotional strain. Employing Pierre Bourdieu's Field Theory, the research analyzes journalists' strategies for accessing conflict zones safely and ensuring the journalistic principles of objectivity and fairness. Using concepts like Capital, Habitus, and Doxa, the study situates journalists within the volatile social landscape to highlight the interconnectedness of their professional and personal spheres. Despite possessing cultural and social capital, journalists face significant risks to their safety while fulfilling their reporting duties in dangerous environments.
This study uses a phenomenological perspective supported by Foucault's 'hermeneutics of the self'... more This study uses a phenomenological perspective supported by Foucault's 'hermeneutics of the self' to analyse Anatole France's novel Thaïs. The novel narrates the story of a Christian hermit, Paphnutius, and a courtesan, Thaïs. Living an abstemious life in the desert and reflecting on his sins of the past, Paphnutius recalls having met a delightful actress, Thaïs and how she seduced men, including him, into the sins of the flesh. Taken in by his exhortations, she leaves all her wealth and possessions and follows the monk to attain eternal beauty and bliss. Paphnutius successfully converts Thaïs to the courtesan before she dies as a 'purified' soul. However, after her conversion, Thaïs's desire and love afflict Paphnutius, who ends up doubting the truth of his faith. When he comes to know that Thaïs is on her deathbed, he starts having doubts about the reality of death and hence of God/his belief. We attempt to add a theoretically driven analysis and set forth a few observations. This paper argues that Thaïs is the story of complex human interactions revolving around the axes of truth and subjectivity and provides an excellent narration of the aesthetics of existence in the pagan and early Christian world.
Liberal Arts & Social Sciences International Journal (LASSIJ), 2023
After taking over Kabul for the second time when the US-led NATO forces left Afghanistan in 2021,... more After taking over Kabul for the second time when the US-led NATO forces left Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban resumed their past practices. To run the affairs of Afghanistan, the Taliban use political Islam, the way they understand and interpret it, as the nodal point around which they articulate the signs and symbols in a chain of equivalence. This paper analyses the Taliban's policies regarding Afghanistan's historical, national, and cultural symbols. Using epistemicide as an analytical device, we argue that in the name of Puritanism and the reconstitution of Afghanistan, according to Sharia, the Taliban discovered and erased all symbols of historical Afghanistan. This tends to serve as a case of epistemicide of the Afghan culture and wipes the slate of Afghan history clean. This paper explains how the Taliban silenced, devalued, and consequently moved to eradicate Afghanistan's cultural memory and knowledge system. This paper provides an account of what the Taliban's policies convey by silencing Afghanistan's historical texts, histories, and narratives. The Afghan society is faced with internal colonisation, which refuses that knowledge production is a social practice that takes into cognisance the history and culture of the Afghan people, among other factors.
Journal of Journalism, Media Science & Creative Arts, 2023
This paper examines local journalists' practices and routines in a state of war in the Swat distr... more This paper examines local journalists' practices and routines in a state of war in the Swat district of Pakistan. In the backdrop of the U.S.-led "war on terror," Pakistan launched lingering 'counter-terror operations' targeting a militant network called the Taliban. Based on in-depth interviews with journalists in Swat and its surrounding troubled districts, this research investigates the challenges local journalists went through while reporting death and destruction. It investigates how local journalists dealt with the trauma of visceral violence in their local, national, and international media coverage. Using Pierre Bourdieu's Field Theory, especially its concepts of 'capital', 'habitus', and 'doxa', this research situates journalists and their routines at the center of troubled social life without distinguishing between the professional world and the newsroom from the community and its challenges. The paper argues that these journalists possess enough cultural and social capital; however, reporting was a challenging task as these journalists compromised journalistic principles of neutrality, objectivity, and professionalism.
Based on in-depth interviews with ethnic Pashtun war journalists, this study explores the cross-b... more Based on in-depth interviews with ethnic Pashtun war journalists, this study explores the cross-border news practices and its underlying economy in Pakistan's troubled tribal region that straddles the Pak-Afghan border. We argue that the structural remnants, including media, of the British colonialism of the past continue to boost the neo-imperialism of the present. Several studies have examined the war reporting in the Pak-Afghan border space, however, the intersection of the postcolonial State, militarization, and cross-border news labor practices is understudied. Backdropped in the critical examination of the news pursuits during the two wars: the Afghan "jihad" and the US-led "war on terror," we show how war as business and news labor as commodity feed into each other and contribute to the making of a material and representational crisis which sustains what Jasbir Puar calls the "economy of injury." ARTICLE HISTORY
Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, Oct 17, 2020
This study sought to examine work-related exposure to trauma and predictors of Post-Traumatic Str... more This study sought to examine work-related exposure to trauma and predictors of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms among regional journalists in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, a conflict-ridden area in northwest Pakistan. We recruited 216 KP journalists. Analysis of the surveys revealed a high prevalence of trauma exposure and PTSD symptoms. All of the participants had covered at least one trauma inducing event. Exposure to work-related trauma, active emotional coping and avoidant emotional coping were statistically significant factors associated with PTSD symptoms. This study is the first to highlight the severity of the impact of trauma on regional journalists in Pakistan.
For the last four decades, Pakistan’s northwestern Pashtun tribal areas have been in a constant s... more For the last four decades, Pakistan’s northwestern Pashtun tribal areas have been in a constant state of imperialist wars. In reaction to this organized violence, a local civil rights movement, the PTM, emerged in 2014 which powerfully challenged the military’s discursive regime that legitimates these US-led wars. However, the military challenged the movement’s call for justice by launching a concerted discursive drive to construct an enemy image of the PTM. This study aims to discover how the military constructs the identity, as well as the cultural and political meanings of the movement. The authors found that the military strategically organizes its discourse to first build a symbolic order in which an enemy other, less than human, is created, and then its oppression is normalized and made invisible. They hope that the article contributes to the current critical scholarship on the increasing militarization of contemporary public spaces and democratic cultures, particularly in the...
For the last five decades, a neoliberal war has been raging through Pakistan’s Pashtun Tribal Are... more For the last five decades, a neoliberal war has been raging through Pakistan’s Pashtun Tribal Areas bordering Afghanistan. The State of Pakistan has been an active shareholder in this never-ending “war on terror.” The State’s biopolitical and racializing policies continuously reproduce the logics through which the Tribal bodies are conveniently and invisibly subjected to a regime of death and maiming. In an attempt to unsettle the State’s biopolitical mandate, we combine Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics to map out the historical genealogy of the imperialist violence in the Tribal border zone. Next, we delineate and examine three major State-deployed discursive strategies through which the exceptional position of this Tribal borderspace and the expendable status of its inhabitants are constructed and naturalized. Towards the end, we also discuss PTM, a grassroots civil rights anti-war movement that is mounting a notable resistance to the necropolitical regime through a non-violent praxis rooted in Pashtun cultural traditions of resistance. The PTM, we conclude, offers an organic counter-Pashtun narrative to the world. The aim of the paper is to stimulate indigenous emancipatory perspectives in the academic literature on the Pashtun Tribal Areas and its people.
For the last five decades, a neoliberal war has been raging through Pakistan’s Pashtun Tribal Are... more For the last five decades, a neoliberal war has been raging through Pakistan’s Pashtun Tribal Areas bordering Afghanistan. The State of Pakistan has been an active shareholder in this never-ending “war on terror.” The State’s biopolitical and racializing policies continuously reproduce the logics through which the Tribal bodies are conveniently and invisibly subjected to a regime of death and maiming. In an attempt to unsettle the State’s biopolitical mandate, we combine Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics to map out the historical genealogy of the imperialist violence in the Tribal border zone. Next, we delineate and examine three major State-deployed discursive strategies through which the exceptional position of this Tribal borderspace and the expendable status of its inhabitants are constructed and naturalized. Towards the end, we also discuss PTM, a grassroots civil rights anti-war movement that is mounting a notable resistance to the necropolitical regime through a non-violent praxis rooted in Pashtun cultural traditions of resistance. The PTM, we conclude, offers an organic counter-Pashtun narrative to the world. The aim of the paper is to stimulate indigenous emancipatory perspectives in the academic literature on the Pashtun Tribal Areas and its people.
Journal of Journalism, Media Science & Creative Arts
This paper analyzes “Pakhto Voices” project run by Public Engagement Policy Lab., a U.K.-based no... more This paper analyzes “Pakhto Voices” project run by Public Engagement Policy Lab., a U.K.-based non-governmental organization, in the light of Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) principles and approaches. The main purpose of the project is to reduce health disparities among the people of the then Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA—now called Tribal Districts or Merged Districts) of Pakistan through a “community-based research project.” According to World Health Organization (WHO), Pakistan is one of the three remaining polio-endemic countries in the world, along with Afghanistan and Nigeria. More than half of the polio cases emerged from the Tribal Districts where people from Pakhtun ethnic group reside. The formative research design of the project employed a fusion of unobtrusive and obtrusive quantitative, qualitative and ethnographic methods. The formative research design had three components: Content Analysis; Citizen Consultation, and SMS data gathering program...
This paper investigates the discourse of public hanging of rapists on the social media space, tha... more This paper investigates the discourse of public hanging of rapists on the social media space, that is, Twitter in Pakistan. It also examines how this discourse is interdiscursively related to the power relations particularly implicated in the discourses on religion and gender and the possible effects of this discursive struggle on society. By employing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) for analysis, this research uses Laclau and Mouffe's Discourse Theory as theoretical framework. We conclude that the discourse approving death by hanging for the rapists is a device to propagate the power and the fear of the State. It has a "repetition induced effect" and implies sovereign's exception; and women are silenced in their demands for justice against the patriarchal social structures which are responsible for crime against women's body. It also reifies the patriarchal structures and controls societies through vengeance rather than reformative justice.
Liberal Arts and Social Sciences International Journal (LASSIJ)
This paper is a qualitative thematic analysis of Hermann Hesse’s novel Narcissus and Goldmund wit... more This paper is a qualitative thematic analysis of Hermann Hesse’s novel Narcissus and Goldmund with a cross-cultural theory framework, buttressed with concepts from Jungian psychology. The novel narrates the story of two medieval priests who are the exact opposite of but emotionally attached to each other. The paper demonstrates how various cultural themes that Hesse has engaged can shed light on the ways Western and Eastern societies make sense of the Self, the Other, and the everyday existential dilemmas. Based on Jungian psychology, we argue that Narcissus and Goldmund are not two distinct characters; instead, they are two aspects of the Self. The social construction of these two characters is the symbolic representation of the struggle to attain the deeper meanings of the Self. This struggle, what Jung called individuation, is the journey of the human soul into its own deepest spheres. Moreover, we note that the matrix of Hesse’s thought is the European interest in the Orient. Na...
Having established its economic power globally, China is now also asserting its soft power in the... more Having established its economic power globally, China is now also asserting its soft power in the international symbolic representational realm-largely dominated by the West. This paper critically evaluates how BBC discursively constructs China in its Online English and Urdu News, and discusses its attendant social, political, and economic implications for the Chinese and Pakistani citizens in particular, and for people all over the world. We also discuss how does the West perceive China's efforts to establish a global soft image and what role BBC plays in it. Using a combination of research tools; Framing, Authorship and Sourcing, the study analyzed 115 news stories. The analysis revealed that 'China-Threat' is the dominant frame in BBC's coverage of China. Second, all stories were written by correspondents stationed outside China. Finally, BBC disproportionately cited Western news/expert sources, and also many sources/reports were unspecified (anonymous). The aim of this paper is to prompt readers to question commonly held assumptions of China propagated mostly by Western media.
This paper investigates the discourse of public hanging of rapists on the social media space, tha... more This paper investigates the discourse of public hanging of rapists on the social media space, that is, Twitter in Pakistan. It also examines how this discourse is interdiscursively related to the power relations particularly implicated in the discourses on religion and gender and the possible effects of this discursive struggle on society. By employing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) for analysis, this research uses Laclau and Mouffe's Discourse Theory as theoretical framework. We conclude that the discourse approving death by hanging for the rapists is a device to propagate the power and the fear of the State. It has a "repetition induced effect" and implies sovereign's exception; and women are silenced in their demands for justice against the patriarchal social structures which are responsible for crime against women's body. It also reifies the patriarchal structures and controls societies through vengeance rather than reformative justice.
This research study is designed to understand reporting traumatic incidents in Pakistani media an... more This research study is designed to understand reporting traumatic incidents in Pakistani media and the individual level factors that influence a journalist's decision while covering a traumatic incident and his/her decision of selecting information to include in or exclude from news. This study uses a qualitative research design to analyze the research question. The researcher used in-depth interviews with journalists in Peshawar and Tribal Districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Thirty journalists were recruited (news reporters, editors and photographers) working for media (print, broadcast and online), whose primary beat is 'crime' or "violent events" along with other beats. The participants of the study were selected by purposive and snowball sampling techniques. Thematic Analysis as a method was used to analyze the data, i.e., interviews with journalists. The data was examined through the lens of the Hierarchy of Influences Model (HOI), which is an extension of the Gatekeeping Theory. The findings show that education, training, experience, focus on crime and conflict, newsworthiness of the story, self-promotion, and Job security influence a journalist's decision while covering a traumatic incident in Pakistani media.
Liberal Arts & Social Sciences International Journal (LASSIJ), 2022
This paper is a qualitative thematic analysis of Hermann Hesse's novel Narcissus and Goldmund wit... more This paper is a qualitative thematic analysis of Hermann Hesse's novel Narcissus and Goldmund with a cross-cultural theory framework, buttressed with concepts from Jungian psychology. The novel narrates the story of two medieval priests who are the exact opposite of but emotionally attached to each other. The paper demonstrates how various cultural themes that Hesse has engaged can shed light on the ways Western and Eastern societies make sense of the Self, the Other, and the everyday existential dilemmas. Based on Jungian psychology, we argue that Narcissus and Goldmund are not two distinct characters; instead, they are two aspects of the Self. The social construction of these two characters is the symbolic representation of the struggle to attain the deeper meanings of the Self. This struggle, what Jung called individuation, is the journey of the human soul into its own deepest spheres. Moreover, we note that the matrix of Hesse's thought is the European interest in the Orient. Narcissus and Goldmund represent the anima and animus or the Yin and Yang of the conflict of selfrealization. We conclude that a synthesis of Eastern and Western philosophies can offer both a fertile avenue and a rich toolkit for seeking deeper self-knowledge.
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Papers by Faizullah Jan