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Tuesday, 29 December 2015
THE RESULT OF THE THIRD SEMESTER EXAMINATION OF ENGLISH LESSON 1 STIK KENDAL
THE RESULT OF THE THIRD SEMESTER EXAMINATION OF ENGLISH LESSON 3 STIK KENDAL
| DAFTAR NILAI BAHASA INGGRIS 3 STIK TAHUN AKADEMIK 2015 | |||||||
| NO | NAMA | ||||||
| 1 | 656 | AHM | A | ||||
| 2 | 657 | Vit | A | ||||
| 3 | 658 | FIT | B+ | ||||
| 4 | 659 | ROH | A | ||||
| 5 | 660 | RIZ | B+ | ||||
| 6 | 661 | SIT | A | ||||
| 7 | 662 | MUH | B+ | ||||
| 8 | 663 | KO | A | ||||
| 9 | 664 | MUH | A | ||||
| 10 | 665 | AMA | B+ | ||||
| 11 | 666 | ZAE | B | ||||
| 12 | 667 | NAI | A | ||||
| 13 | 668 | RIFKI HALIMI | D | ||||
| 14 | 669 | M AKHSIN FUADI | D | ||||
| 15 | 670 | M AB | B+ | ||||
| 16 | 671 | ABD | B+ | ||||
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Saturday, 19 December 2015
UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING, DIGITAL FAILURE AND CITIZENSHIP LEARNING IN SWEDISH POPULAR EDUCATION
Lina Rahm and Andreas Fejes Linköping University Sweden lina.rahm@liu.se, andreas.fejes@liu.se Full reference: Rahm, L. & Fejes, A. (2015)
Ubiquitouscomputing, digital failure and ctiizenship learning in Swedish popular education. Citizenship Teaching & Learning, 10(2), 127-142. ABSTRACT How do adult students enact citizenship, and what discursive and material conditions make certain enactments more or less possible? This paper draws on 37 interviews with adult students at Swedish Folk High Schools and focuses on the everyday material-discursive enactments of interactive media in adult students’ statements about citizenship. Drawing on a post-constructional perspective, the analysis illustrates how students’ statements about citizenship are made possible by ever-present media technologies and the associated practices of ‘living in media’.
Students’ statements continuously reiterate how notions of citizenship are entangled with the Internet (and other new media). However, while new media are deeply embedded in the everyday lives of citizens and enables important citizenship enactments they are also a source of discomfort, giving rise to ambiguous statements. These double-edged statements refer on the one hand to negative implications on physical health, distraction from important tasks and an over-reliance on the Internet as an everyday need, and on the other hand to improved access to information, convivial communities and empowered citizenship. Keywords: Citizenship, Citizenship Education, Adult Learning, New Media, Folk High Schools, Popular Education. INTRODUCTION This paper reports on the results from a study that examined how adult students enrolled in a Folk High School in Sweden discursively and materially enact citizenship. The students are registered at courses providing the equivalent of a degree from upper secondary school/and or provide eligibility to enter higher education.
The school itself is supported through government funding and does thereby not require tuition fees. In order to receive government funding the schools must comply with certain general guidelines for such funding. These guidelines contain, for example, to strengthen and develop democracy; to provide support for a greater diversity of people to gain control over their life situation, and to participate in community development; to contribute to the equalizing of educational disparities; and to increase the participation and education in society in general (The Government Bill 2005/06:192). The phrasing of such purposes, general as they may be, clearly show how Folk High School education has an overall ambition to foster democratic citizens (Fejes 2012; Larsson 2013). However, citizenship is generally not taught as a specific topic in the Swedish educational system, but is envisioned as something that should permeate the education as a whole, both in form and content. As mentioned, a primary educational task for Folk High Schools is therefore the somewhat vague undertaking to create a better society based on democratic and participatory principles. Such view is supported by studies that show how social alienation is connected to low participation in democratic processes, which in turn has resulted in the explicit assignment for the Swedish education system to tackle this societal problem (Nicoll et al. 2013). Citizenship education has thus emerged as a general response to declining civic engagement and the potential breakdown of important social ties. Citizenship education can therefore be regarded as a necessary counter-measure that will allow for students to become ‘proper’ citizens. This means that students are citizens in the making (Marshall 1950). However, this stance also positions students as not-yet-citizens (G. Biesta, Lawy and Kelly 2009; Nicoll et al. 2013), suggesting that individuals are lacking (what is described as) the proper values and skills to be regarded and treated as full citizens. Much of the research on citizenship education focus either on how students can develop the skills necessary to become active citizens (Arnot and Dillabough 2000; Björk 1999; R Smith, Middleton and L 2003; Öhrn, Lundahl and Beach 2011) or it theoretically and philosophically problematizes the ‘appropriate configuration of citizenship’ (cf. Aspin 2007; G. Biesta J. J 2011; Gutmann 1987; Olson 2008; Roth and Burbules 2007; Westheimer and Kahne 2004). Rarely does research ask students themselves about their view and experience of citizenship education (cf. Olson et al. 2014). Similarly in the context of the classroom, student’s experiences are often downplayed, seen as irrelevant or even ignored (Brookfield 1986; Grannäs 2011; Lundahl and Olson 2013; Öhrn et al. 2011).
In addition, research on citizenship tends to pre-define the concept of citizenship, which may obscure and confine diverse enactments of citizenship both in education as well as in everyday practices. More recently the concerns about low levels of political participation and engagement, have met with much hope being invested in social media sites (e.g. Facebook and Twitter) as places for increased political interest and greater democratic agency. New media is often described as enabling new forms of citizenship enactments and democratic activities, as well as including a greater variety of social groups usually excluded from political contexts. Popular examples of how activism can be fuelled by social media is the ‘Occupy movement’, the ‘Indignados’ in Spain and the ‘Arab Spring’ (e.g. Khondke 2011). However, research on the political uses of social media is also diverse and show, for example that enactments of citizenship are increasingly personalized and dependent on the affordances of social media functionality in itself (Bennet 1998, 2012) and can be described as networked individualism (Ratto and Boler 2014) rather than democratic participation. Other studies show that the political uses of digital media are in fact less prevalent than the widespread use of social media might suggest (Rainie, Smith, Schlozman, H, and Verba 2012; Thorson 2014) suggesting that neologisms such as ‘clicktivism’ and ‘slacktivism’ are better terms to describe counterproductive forms of engagement mobilized in order to numb the bad conscience of the middle class rather than produce change (Fuchs 2014). On the perhaps even more pessimistic side, research also show how hopes of increased democratic possibilities are often weakened by social ambiguities in relation to (imagined) audiences and reception (Thorson 2014) or even crushed by state and corporate power (Deibert 2014).
As such, very little work actually considers how the mundane and everyday making of citizenship in increasingly computerized societies is a question of entanglement between new media and adult education. Therefore, this study aims to analyse how citizenship is enacted in students’ own lives, within as well as outside of education. In doing so, the starting point for this paper is that students are already, in some capacity, citizens. Thus, our aim is to answer the question: how do adult students describe their own enactment of citizenship and what discursive and material conditions make these enactments more or less possible? To further precise the focus of this paper, we will examine how, what we may call ubiquitous computing (i.e. ever-present media technologies), works as a material-discursive precondition through which the citizen is made. This article thus contributed with a critical discussion of the material-discursive prerequisites that makes citizenship-enactments more or less possible in everyday practices as well as in adult education. FROM CENTRAL CONCEPTS TO ANALYTIC DIMENSIONS In order to elicit adult students’ citizenship enactments, including both the material and the discursive conditions that make these enactments more or less possible, a post-constructional theoretical framework is mobilized. This framework combines the toolbox of Foucault (Fejes and Nicoll 2008; Foucault 1972, 1980), with central concepts from new materialist theorizing (Barad 1998; Coole and Frost 2010; Lykke 2010). In a world increasingly made up of hybrid phenomena (Latour 1993) and imploded objects (Haraway 1992) timely research calls for an approach that take both discourse and material objects seriously. According to Foucault discourses are defined by a clustering of statements: “the term discourse can be defined as the group of statements that belong to a single system of formation” (Foucault 1972: 107). Within the frames of this paper, this means that a statement about citizenship is what is identifiable as citizenship inside a particular discourse (i.e. conforming to the rules that makes a certain statement possible).
However, discourses and material realities also co-construct each other. That is, the material world—objects, technologies, machines, gadgets and so on, take part in the formation of discourses and discourses take part in the enactments of the material world (Barad, 1998 2003; Fenwick and Edwards 2013; Foucault 1972; Hardy 2011; Matthewman 2014). Therefore, and unlike many other approaches focusing solely on discourse, this paper pays special attention to material conditions as they unfold in students’ statements. This may seem counterintuitive, but acknowledging how students describe the material underpinnings of citizenship is a first step towards a richer socio-material analysis. This is perhaps especially important when studying digital media use, where a certain distribution of agency is evident. That is, the increasing capacities of digital media to channel everyday enactments also put an increasing amount of agential power in the technological design itself. As such, the words of Karen Barad seems particularly poignant: “The point is not merely that there are important material factors in addition to discursive ones; rather, the issue is the conjoined material-discursive nature of constraints, conditions, and practices” (Barad 2003: 823). Unlocking the Notion of Citizenship Citizenship is often described as the rights and obligations that come with living as a full/adequate member of society in a state (Marshall 1950). While this definition is general, this study will not subscribe to any pre-defined definition of citizenship but instead aim to open up this concept by examining how students themselves speak about what they do as citizens. That is, to explore how they, in the general flow of everyday life (Thorson 2012), describe their performance/enactment of citizenship. The underpinning rationale for this is to avoid any potential foreclosing of what can be included in the notion of citizenship, theoretically allowing for different discourses to emerge. Life in Media Seeing how this paper is concerned with the entanglement of citizenship education and new media, a more media-theoretical complement to the general socio-material approach of this paper is needed. As such, we also use certain conceptualizations of media as expressed by Deuze, van Doorn and Baym (Baym 2009; Deuze 2012; Doorn 2011).
In Deuze’s conceptualization media includes (physical) machines, information and information technologies. From this follows that practices in digital spaces can today not be easily separated from practices in physical spaces. Deuze therefore argues that media is both a necessary and inevitable part of our lives—we are not living with media, but in media. As such, Deuze wants to circumvent the dualist idea that machines are either controlling people or being controlled by people. A non-dualist view instead makes it possible to explore performances and processes as a question of what can be done rather than simple outcome- or effect-analyses. Van Doorn (2011) goes on to theorize digital space as a convergence of the virtual and the material. The virtual (e.g. our memories, feelings and desires) is actualized as digital objects, which can in turn be seen as located in-between the virtual and the material. As such, the virtual is not the opposite of the real, but an integrated part of it. The separation between online and offline, virtual and material, real and unreal therefore becomes untenable in many ways (Baym 2009; Deuze 2012). Media is consequently not an isolated aspect of modern life — and accordingly everyday enactments of citizenship are also interwoven with media (Baym 2009). In conclusion, we stress that enactments of citizenship cannot be reduced to discourses or media technologies alone, but rather a discursive-material relationship that can be described as a continuous process of co-construction. By beginning to pull on one thread of this entanglement, namely student statements about everyday citizenship, this paper will provide important clues into how this co-construction takes place.
METHODS In order to collect statements about citizenship a field study and continuous interviews with student were conducted. The setting was a Swedish Folk High School, which had been selected on the requirements that it was large enough to accommodate several different courses and that we, had the opportunity to present the project at a tutoring session for all the school’s teachers and thereby get them ‘on board’. This was identified as an important precondition in order to get a smoother access to the students. As ‘citizens’ and ‘citizenship’ are words that, in Swedish, are not that common in everyday language and because the project had an ambition to open up these concept (i.e., reach beyond the immediate and formal descriptions of citizenship such as for example ‘voting’) the process of getting access to the studied field was important. During four months, one of the authors continuously visited the school and observed the teaching taking place within five different educational programs. Initial contact was taken with students asking them if they were willing to participate in the study and if they were willing to document (photograph, film or record sound) citizenship enactments in their lives (both in and out of the school context). No prior definition of citizenship was presented to the students. Instead they were asked to document their citizenship enactments according to their own definition of the term. After about a week of documentation, semi-structured individual interviews were conducted. The overarching purpose of the interviews was to collect statements around the documentation, where students were asked what they had documented (and not documented) and why they documented what they did. In total 37 interviews were performed, and all interviews were transcribed in verbatim.
The transcripts were analysed with a focus on identifying regularities of statements about citizenship, and more specifically on its discursive and material conditions (Barad 1998; Nicoll et al. 2013). The elicited descriptions were not measured against any pre-defined notion of citizenship. Rather, the analysis followed an abductive approach, enabling an alteration between the dataset and relevant theories (including the potential to introduce new theory in the analysis to better and interpret and meaningful explain important dimensions). Statements about the Internet and pervasive computing emerged early on as one of the most central categories across the data material. In the rest of this paper we will elaborate on how such statements are construed, including central enactments and their material and discursive conditions. FINDINGS Notably, and serving as a starting point for this paper, the interviews did not contain direct questions about digital media. Rather we asked them: tell us what you do as a citizen within the school as well as in your everyday life, and they told us about—digital media. Consequently, the main finding discussed in this article is that citizenship is described as most often being enacted through ever-present media-technologies. Statements of citizenship in media are referred to in two ways—explicitly or implicitly. That is, descriptions would circle explicitly around how media was enmeshed with citizenship, or descriptions would not be directly about media, but the students would nevertheless exemplify their statements by referring to media technologies. Three central sub-themes emerged: 1) citizenship actualized through ubiquitous computing; 2) citizenship and digital failure; and 3) citizenship, community and anonymity. These themes were visible constructed in relation to life within as well as outside of education. Citizenship Actualized Through Ubiquitous Computing This theme relates to the general observation of how media technologies in themselves are repeatedly discussed and depicted in students’ statements of citizenship.
This is done both explicitly and implicitly. Implicit statements about media refer to ways in which media lurk in the background of statements, but are not emphasized in itself. For example, students would take pictures of a television set, talking about natural catastrophes and how you, as a citizen, have an obligation to help. Students also took pictures of their computer screens showing what they store on their hard drives. It was also common to take pictures of computers or tablets and describe them as enactments of citizenship in education. However, often the device itself was not discussed, rather it was referred to as a prerequisite for education and thus for enactments of citizenship education. This also indicates the importance of information in relation to citizenship. Being informed, but also being able to produce, store and share information is construed as an important part of being a citizen. Further, it was common to take pictures of the web pages of public authorities. This relates more clearly to a notion of citizenship as
being able to easily and quickly find public information and reach authorities around the clock. However, it may also indicate how access to public authorities is immediately linked to access to the Internet, and how ‘Internet-presence’ is the main way public authorities are manifested. The examples above display how media is, in a way, hidden in everyday life i.e. perceived as a taken-for-granted (and thereby also ubiquitous) precondition for enactments of citizenship. As such, some of the respondents also explicitly discuss how media is ever-present in their everyday activities. For example some students took pictures of their partners by the computer, illustrating how spending time by the computer is a common part of life. An informant, who took pictures of his computer keyboard, and commented, ”That’s where most of us live nowadays” further illuminates the mundane importance of media technologies. These examples repeatedly show how technologies, such as computers, become domesticized, embedded and ineluctable in everyday life. Citizenship enactments in everyday practices, as they are told to us, are to a great extent situated in media. At the same time, the statements may indicate how we have stopped thinking about media critically (and instead accepted its power position and taken it for granted). That is, students presume its omnipresence. Media technologies have become an extremely established feature of our everyday lives and they also come to shape its different enactments. They are described as part of a taken-for-granted standard of life. By way of reasoning, this means that media determines when and how you are enabled to enact (or become prevented from enacting) citizenship. As such, several interviewees not only tell of how their everyday life is permeated and made possible by media, but also of how it remains in the background until it crashes or fails, which leads us to the next enactment of citizenship in media as it is displayed in the interviews. Citizenship and Digital Failure As previously argued, media technologies are now ubiquitous to the degree that they only reveal themselves once they fail. When a computer crashes; when you fail your courses due to too much World of Warcraft gaming; when authorities survey and limit your Internet use; or when services, such as Facebook, do not deliver on their promises of improved personal relations.
In all these situations media disrupts what is seen as citizenship enactments. Putting it promptly, media reveals itself to us through failure. By not functioning as expected, media technologies expose their power over our daily lives. As a consequence the making of citizenship also falters without media. In other words, access to the Internet is a fundamental condition that enables citizenship, but also one which only becomes visible to citizens once it fails: Fragment 1 Tell me about the picture you’ve taken This is a picture of a time when my Internet [connection] was down What? Well, it is like this, now, when the Internet doesn’t work, my screen shows a picture of a dinosaur Ok, so what are your thoughts on that? I think that citizenship means having access to the Internet. Here’s what I thought: citizenship, it is about rights and obligations, that’s what you have as a citizen. And, in fact, each and every citizen in a country doesn’t have access to the Internet and the knowledge we have. So, it is pretty cool to have that access, so I thought it wouldn’t be very nice to not have that access. What does the Internet mean to you? When do you use it? Oh! All the time! Every time I fiddle with my phone I am online – even if you only play a game you need access. And we work a lot with Google Drive and then you need to be online all the time.
So when I study I am online all the time, same thing at the university. I mean, you could write in Word I guess, but I still need to be connected to LISAM [the university course management system] because I take distance courses… so I don’t have any lectures. Instead I have to search for information, books, papers and so on. So…all the time! I mean, what would happen if I didn’t have access to the Internet at home? Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Whenever you want to do something, go to a movie say. I don’t check the paper for what movies are showing, I go to the cinema homepage and check. If we decide to eat out I’ll go on the net to check for good restaurants. You use Google all the time. You don’t even think about how much you use the Internet and what an amazing resource it actually is – you take it for granted. This quote, which reappears in similar forms across several interviews, shows how our everyday life is made possible by media, and how it permeates life, remaining in the background until it crashes or fails. In fact, it seems plausible that we have stopped thinking about media critically – it is just there, all the time. We presume its omnipresence and as such its power is obscured until failure occurs.
Building on both Deuze (2012) and the student statements, we consequently propose that media technologies are becoming increasingly powerful in the shaping of citizenship and must therefore be analyzed as an integral part of citizenship education. Much like citizenship is limited and hindered without the Internet, one of the respondents describes how he felt his citizenship ended once Sweden signed The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) 1 : Fragment 2 I think that when the Swedish government decides to, or when the European Parliament decides to enforce ACTA without a public vote, I am totally not a citizen. It is like when a big company with lots of money or much influence on the European Parliament adds a rule just like that. It is so wrong! […] I think file sharing is a good thing. It leads to good knowledge. It is simple and useful to be able to share anything and everything. As of now, we live in a very complicated IT-society. People read a lot on the Internet, watch movies, documentaries, learn languages and everything. While this statement illuminates how being overrun by governmental powers is described as creating a feeling of eradicated citizenship, it also shines a light on a parallel description where the Internet is given a key role in being and becoming a citizen. 1 Sweden has signed the agreement, but it does not mean that Sweden can implement the law. As the EU Parliament has voted against the agreement, Sweden can not ratify it Interestingly, the public discourse around ACTA (and how it makes the tracing of online activities necessary) often intertwines with the discourse around personal integrity and the importance of online anonymity.
This interlacing of public discourses is also visible in the interview material, why citizenship and anonymity also becomes a pertinent dimension. Digital Citizenship, Community and Anonymity Technological systems, such as computers are also social systems. As Lewis et al indicates: “[A]n ironic revelation of the television-computer age is that what people want from machines is humanity: stories, contact and interaction” (Lewis, Amini, & Lannon 2001: 198). As such, statements about citizenship in media are also statements about interconnections and fellowship with others. Interestingly, several of the informants provide statements about the game World of Warcraft (WoW) when asked about everyday citizenship. A number of the interviewees have had WoW gaming as their main occupation for many years. One of the respondents even claims that it was the most central aspect of her life for more than five years. All of the WoW-gamers in the study have significantly reduced their gaming or, indeed, quit entirely. WoW is also provided as the main reason for failing to complete upper secondary school and thereby also the reason for studying at a folk high school. Interestingly, one aspect that is reported to make WoW so tantalizing for students is that it enables strong feelings of community, which are also linked to citizenship by providing a social and communicative arena.
However, it also sustains its opposite—failing school and failing to participating in ‘real’ enactments of citizenship. Still, and perhaps most noteworthy, when we asked respondents about differences between online and offline communities, all of the WoW-playing respondents describe how anonymity makes online communities more real and more genuine than offline communities, and how this genuine community is described as a pre-condition for being a citizen. Fragment 3 I mean, it is people that I have never met, but with whom I am very close. Meanwhile there are people I meet in school everyday that I wouldn’t approach with the same topics and be as open with. Because you are quite anonymous, at least before Facebook and stuff. Or maybe it was the same, but at least everyone wasn’t Facebook-friends with all that personal information and that. Thus, anonymity is positioned as a condition of truly genuine fellowship with others. Anonymity is described as an important requirement for community and Facebook is described as the opposite of anonymity. At the same time Facebook is also one of the more common subjects illustrating everyday citizenship enactments. One informant, who took pictures of the Facebook login page, explains that the application is ubiquitous in everyday practices but also how “It’s so very narcissistic and attention seeking, it’s all about how many likes your status update will get. And that is just so horrible to me”. The student further explains that he is trying to counter what he describes as fake content on Facebook by posting funny jokes, which are then described as enactments of citizenship by spreading joy and thus change society for the better.
Community is not only concrete it is also virtual. The virtual becomes a basic condition for certain citizenship statements, i.e. the statements of citizenship as feelings of community. Facebook is described as part of everyday citizenship enactments but also as meaningless and fake, which in turn is described as the opposite of being a citizen. Similarly, WoW-gaming is often described in very positive terms albeit in hindsight, where it may have completely disrupted studying. It is also common to describe the communal experience from a learning perspective. For example, language skill improvements and leadership abilities are mentioned as benefits from gaming together with others. Despite this, all respondents who talk about WoW have stopped playing. The reasons they give is failing school and gaining bodily weight from just sitting all the time. Fragment 6 I played it and I learned a lot from it. It is so great, the whole of WoW. It is like a circle of friends that I have never met. It is awesome! I played, over a period of about a year or so, more than 10 hours every day. […] You wake up, put the computer on a log in. Every day. Unfortunately this also happened every school day. So my first year was downhill. [..] I mean, you go to a school where Internet is free and you get a computer. That’s it. And then your class is maybe not the most disciplined. So you idolize better gamers instead of people who do well in school. […] Gaming was my life then. I spoke to Finns, Brits…on Skype – they were my friends. It was my life, but then I realized that it’s not gonna work. I gained weight, lagged behind in school and that. So one summer I just decided to quit. In a way, these statements of others tell us, not only about human-to-human interaction, but also about human/non-human assemblages (Barad 2003) and mediated life where performative practices that constitute a particular social network is only possible because of the technology that enhances the material aspects of sustainable enactments (Doorn, 2011). WoW is depicted in the quotation above as a node where enactments of citizenship actualizes for example, cosmopolitical community, friendship and knowledge, but at the same time citizenship is enhanced by the specific affordances of the technology.
This is further displayed in the fragment below where the informant is asked about enactments of being a citizen in his life: Fragment 7 Maybe being with friends, maybe my computers screen. It is a community as well, like when I used to play much more than I do now, I was in a guild, like, and we were maybe 80 people from around the world, like, and when we all of us talked to each other it was like a huge conversation, and you felt […] like communal, it is a strong community. Thus, technological systems co-evolve with social systems and are enacted and experienced as communities, which in turn are co-creating citizenship. Much as Mark Deuze says: “We emotionally invest ourselves into media as much as our media become an affective part of us” (Deuze 2012: xi). Life in media turns us into both consumers and producers of information and surely much of the information we share online is not created by authorities or companies, but by ourselves. This essentially means that we provide value-generating labour for corporations and businesses that collect, record, extract, exchange or sell data about us (Deuze 2012). The informant in the quotation displayed above sees community as a performance of citizenship in his life. Community can thereby be seen as agential intra-action between humans and designed technology. Software and hardware are effectively intermeshed with our daily performances. As a consequence mediated society is both individual and interconnected, jut like it is also both embodied and virtual (Doorn 2011).
Recent studies show that our online identities often are identical with our offline identities. Despite the possibility that it is easy to play around with gender, ethnicity or age in an online forum people rarely take advantage of such possibilities. (Davis 2011; Kennedy 2006). Students’ statements also display an intertwining of online and offline identities - so much, in fact, that the absence of Internet disables life as a full citizen. The intertwining between offline and online is opposed only in statements about WoW, that outlines opportunities for anonymity, which makes it possible to be yourself which in turn even enhances friendship and cooperation. Digital games scholars have shown how corporeality is actualized in digital environments such as WoW, where race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality reproduces asymmetric power relations in which whiteness, masculinity and heterosexuality are enacted as hegemonic, but also how online community can create resistance that mobilizes change against racism, homophobia or sexism (Doorn 2011; Nakamura 2009, 2013). The fact that none of the informants in this study talk about intersectional inequalities in WoW could be interpreted as saying more about the selection of interviewed students than about WoW and that we expressly did not ask interviewees in depth about what they do as citizens in the game, but instead focused on what they want to talk about what they do as citizens in their everyday lives. Nevertheless, citizenship is also displayed as fitting in the network of society i.e. for example, coping with school and being healthy.
For those who do not fit in the network and thus in the intermingling with technology, a material-discursive misfit occurs. Of course, no networks are stabile and standardized for everyone, and there will always be concurrent processes of (mis)fitting in technology-saturated everyday life (Star 1991). Thus citizenship is described as heterogeneous, as multiple memberships. The analysis of anonymity, community and digital citizenship display a mix of benefits and drawbacks depending on who is currently the stakeholder in focus. What can be said with certainty though is that the Internet is an arena —by many respondents construed as indispensable–—where citizenship is enacted. CONCLUSION This study has identified three pertinent dimensions in relation to the use of digital media and the enactment of citizenship. Student’s statements of citizenship have led us to firmly acknowledge the intermeshing of media in notions of citizenship enactments. That is, statements of citizenship are also statements of ubiquitous computing which enables citizenship. Media is ever-present, but at the same time also invisible. The only time we notice media is when it does not work. When its functionality breaks down we come to notice the gadget (or software) in itself (Deuze 2012). And when failure occurs, when we must redo exams, when we gain weight, when our hard drive crash, media becomes a visible issue anew. Citizenship as it is narrated in this study is a form of becoming-with-media and (mis)fittingwith-technology. That is, when media technology fails us a material-discursive misfit occurs.
This misfit or failure comes with a cost; it has material effects on the body and on the feasibility of being a citizen (i.e. to fit in society). Failure is situated in an intersection where technology, discourses and individuals meet. For example, the statements about WoW and Facebook are double-edged. Anonymous gaming enables citizenship but also holds risks of failing in other important enactments—such as education, health and social relationships. Citizenship is consequently displayed in a heterogeneous manner. Failing to be a citizen is life without media as well as within. Thus, citizenship highlights multiple memberships, disruptions and contradictions. Internet can be seen as one of the most central infrastructures of modern society. However, the Internet is much more than apps on your smartphone, your electronic gadgets, or how you consume news and music. Every time you use your credit card, the Internet mediates your transactions. When you ‘beep’ your travel card, the information is synchronized with an online database. New archives of digital media enable (or restrict) new access to information and memories. Within the OECD, Sweden is ranked as the country with the highest ratings in computer literacy, i.e. proficiency in problem solving in technology-rich environments (OECD 2013).
Being offline is an anomaly in Sweden and it is arguably impossible to avoid the Internet (Lundin 2012; Snickars 2014). As seen from the interviews, these preconditions effect enactments of citizenship at a fundamental level. In what ways then, could we say that citizenship and ever-present media is connected? Is this too wide a question to ask? Maybe. Perhaps there is also a risk of moralizing over new technologies in the same ways that earlier debates argued that video games make us violent, that cassette tapes kill the music industry or that we will become Satanists if we listen to heavy metal albums in reverse. By saying that 1) we live our lives in media and 2) citizenship is co-constructed by media are we not repeating the same mistake? From the viewpoint of the analysis put forth here the answer must be—No. The fact that we live with omnipresent media technologies, in fact demand us to research and understand how this co-construction takes place, beyond the traditional question of distribution and access. This intermingling of humans and media technologies, which we have argued is such an important part of enabling citizenship in adult students lives, enables exclusion and empowerment hand-in-hand. So, by remaining critical we are able to debunk overly techno-centric rhetoric and question how new media potentially supports neo-liberal individualism as well as enable community.
The relation between media, society and everyday life is of course complex (using your VISA-card is not the same as playing WoW for five years, which is not the same as visiting the web page of the Employment Agency). This article could hence be seen as an explorative study of how citizenship and media are intermeshed and what that entanglement might do to us and to citizenship education. In conclusion, analysing the statements of young adult students will enable us to highlight the importance of perceiving citizenship as situated inside mediated lives. It will also account for material-discursive pre-conditions for citizenship as well as problematizing the diverse setting in which citizenship is enacted with technology. Media is such an important part of being and becoming a citizen that it arises as a dimension of citizenship enactments without specifically asking about it. Media is embedded in the everyday lives of citizens, but it is also stated as something that bothers and worries people. On closer inspection, this entanglement consists of tensions between the omnipresence of new media in citizenship statements and the double feelings that are described as arising from it. The double feelings in turn, consist of statements about physical health, information access/overload, failure and community. As such, there seems to be an interesting and meaningful tension there, subject to further study.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We are very grateful to the anonymous reviewers for valuable and constructive comments. REFERENCES Arnot, M and Dillabough, J.-A. (Eds.), (2000), ‘Challanging Democracy. International Perspectives on Gender, Education and Citizenship’, London: Routledge Falmer. Aspin, D. N. (ed.), (2007), Philosophical Perspectives on Lifelong Learning. Dortrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Barad, K. (1998), ‘Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality’, differences: A journal of feminist Cultural Studies, 10:2, pp. 87-128. Barad, K. (2003), ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward and Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28:3, pp. 801- 831. Baym, N. K. (2009), ‘A Call For Grounding in the Face of Blurred Boundaries’. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14, pp. 720-723. Bennet, W. L. (1998), ‘The uncivic culture: Communication, identity, and the rise of lifestyle politics’, PS: Political Science & Politics, 31:4, pp. 740-761. Bennet, W. L. (2012), ‘The Personalization of Politics: Political Identity, Social Media, and Changing Patterns of Participation’, ANNALS, 644, pp. 20-39. Biesta, G. J. J. (2011), Learning Democracy in School and Society: Education, Learning and the Politics of Citizenship, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Biesta, G. Lawy, R. and Kelly, N. (2009), ‘Understanding young people's citizenship learning in every day life: The role of contexts, relationships and dispositions’. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 4:5, pp. 5-24. Björk, G. (1999), ‘Att förhandla sitt medborgarskap: Kvinnor som kollektiva politiska aktörer i Örebro 1900-1950’, Örebro: Örebro University. Brookfield, S. (1986), ‘Media power and the development of media literacy. An adult educational interpretation’, Harward Educational Review, 56:2, pp. 151-171. Coole, D. and Frost, S. (2010), New Materialism. Ontology, Agency and Politics, Durham & London: Duke University Press. Deibert, R. (2014), ‘Foreward’, in M. Ratto and M. Boler (eds.), DIY citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Deuze, M. (2012), Media Life, Cambridge: Polity Press. Doorn, N. V. (2011), ‘Digital spaces, material traces: How matter comes to matter in online performance of gender, sexuality and embodiment’, Media, Culture & Society, 33:4, pp. 531-547. Fejes, A. (2012), ‘Mot ett vidgat medborgarskapsbegrepp - en forskningsansats’ in S. Boozon, K. Hansson, M.-B. Imnander and A. Viirman (eds.), Årsbok om folkbildning, Stockholm: Föreningen för folkbildningsforskning. Fejes, A. and Nicoll, K. (eds.), (2008), Foucault and lifelong learning: Governing the subject, London: Routledge. Fenwick, T. and Edwards, R. (2013), ‘Performative ontologies: sociomaterial approaches to researching adult education and lifelong learning’. RELA, 4:1, pp. 49-63. Foucault, M. (1972), The archealogy of knowledge, New York: Harper. Foucault, M. (1980), ‘Prison talk’, in C. I. Gordon (ed.), Power/knowledge. Selected interviews & other writings 1972-1977, New York: Pantheon. Fuchs, C. (2014), Social Media a critical introduction, Los Angeles, London, New Dehli, Singapore, Washington: Sage. Grannäs, J. (2011), Framtidens demokratiska medborgare: Om ungdomar, medborgarskap och demokratifostran i svensk skola, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis: Uppsala. Gutmann, A. (1987), Democratic Education, Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. Haraway, D. (1992), ‘Ecce Homo, Ain't (Ar'n't) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Post-Humanist Landscape’, in J. B. J. W. Scott (ed.), Feminists Theorize the Political, New York: Routledge. Hardy, N. (2011), ‘Foucault, Genealogy, Emergence: Re-Examining The Extra-Discursive’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 4:1, pp 68-91. Khondke, H. H. (2011), ‘Role of the New Media in the Arab Spring’, Globalizations, 8:5, pp. 675-679. Larsson, S. (2013), Vuxen-didaktik, Stockholm: Natur & Kultur. Latour, B. (1993), We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lewis, T. Amini, F. and Lannon, R. (2001), A general theory of love, New York: Vintage. Lundahl, L. and Olson, M. (2013), ‘Democracy lessons in market-oriented schools: The case of Swedish upper secondary education’. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 8:2, pp. 201-213. Lundin, P. (2012), Computers in Swedish society: documenting early use and trend, London: Springer. Lykke, N. (2010), Feminist Studies. A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing, London: Routledge. Marshall, T. H. (1950), Citizenship and social class, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matthewman, S. (2014), ‘Michel Foucault, Technology, and Actor-Network Theory’, Techné: Reserach in Philosophy and Technology, 17:2, pp. 274-292. Nakamura, L. (2009), ‘Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 26:2, pp. 128-144. Nakamura, L. (2013), ‘’It’s a Nigger in Here! Kill the Nigger!’ User-Generated Media Campaigns Against Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia in Digital Games’, in A. N. Valdivia and K. Gates (eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, Vol. VI: Media Studies Futures: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Nicoll, K. Fejes, A. Olsonc, M. Magnus, Dahlstedt, and Biestae, G. (2013), ‘Opening discourses of citizenship education: a theorization with Foucault’. Journal of Education Policy, 28:6, pp. 828-846. OECD. (2013), ‘OECD Skills Outlook 2013: First Results from the Survey of Adult Skills’, http://skills.oecd.org/OECD_Skills_Outlook_2013.pdf. Accessed 1 January 2015. Olson, M. (2008), Från nationsbyggare till global marknadsnomad : om medborgarskap i svensk utbildningspolitik und 1990-talet, Linköpings University: Linköping. Olson, M. Fejes, A. Dahlstedt, M. and Nicoll, K. (2014), ’Citizenship discourses: Production and curriculum’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, in press, DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2014.883917. R, L. Smith, N. Middleton, S., and L, C. (2003), ‘Young people talk about citizenship: empirical perspectives on theoretical and political debates’, Citizenship Studies, 7:2, pp. 235-253. Rainie, L. Smith, A. Schlozman, K. L, H, B. and Verba, S. (2012), ‘Social media and political engagement’, Pew Research Center‘s Internet & American Life Project, http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/10/19/social-media-and-political-engagement/. Accessed 1 February 2014. Ratto, M. and Boler, M. (eds.), (2014), DIY Citizenship. Critical Making and Social Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Roth, K. and Burbules, N. (eds.), (2007), Changing Notions of Citizenship Education in Contemporary Nation-states, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Snickars, P. (2014), Digitalism: när allt är internet, Stockholm: Volante. Star, S. L. (1991), ‘Power, technology and the phenomenology of conventions: on being allergic to onions’, in J. Law (ed.), A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology, and Domination, London/New York: Routledge. The Government Bill. (2005/06:192), ‘Lära, växa, förändra’. Regeringens folkbildningsproposition, http://www.regeringen.se/content/1/c6/06/04/33/284dc33f.pdf. Accessed 1 January 2015. Thorson, K. (2012), ‘What does it mean to be a good citizen? Citizenship vocabularies as resources for action’, ANNALS, AAPSS, 644, pp. 70-85. Thorson, K. (2014), ‘Facing an uncertain reception: young citizens and political interaction on Facebook’, Information, Communication & Society, 17:2, pp. 203-216. Westheimer, J. and Kahne, J. (2004), ‘What kind of citizen? The politics of educating for democracy’, American Educational Research Journal, 41:2, pp. 237-269. Öhrn, E. Lundahl, L. and Beach, D. (eds.), (2011), Young people's influence and democratic education. London: Tufnell Press.
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http://go.oclasrv.com/afu.php?zoneid=1517735
DREAMS OF THE ARAB SPRING
by Deirdre Barrett and Stanley Krippner
Crick and Mitchison’s article on REM sleep as a random brain process involved off-line memory consolidation.[ii]It reinforced the view, already held by many neuroscientists, which dream content is basically without meaning. These writers based their thinking on the notion that the brain is a neural network that stores information during the day but nighttime stochastic noise is needed to “cleanse” it of unwanted information that would otherwise overload its capacity. However, later neural network stimulations tended to focus on the opposite problem of how such systems can overcome noise.[iii] Crick and Michelson pressed their idea so far as to assert that people should not recall their dreams because such attempts may retain patterns of thought that “are better forgotten.”
Contrary to these perspectives, many investigations of dream reports suppose the conclusion that dream narratives are not random and unpatterned but, in Alfred Adler’s terms, reflect a basic continuity with daily life.[iv] This point of view was developed later by Calvin Hall[v]among others. This continuity between dream reports and dreamers’ everyday life has been demonstrated not only for individuals[vi]but for cultures as well.[vii]
For example, Monroe, Nerlove, and Daniels[viii] studied three groups of male Nigerian students, finding that their dream content differed in relation to their tribal backgrounds. The Ibo culture has a value system favoring upward social mobility. Hausa culture does not support social mobility and individual achievement. The Yoruba culture takes an intermediate position. The Yoruba students’ dream reports contained more achievement themes than those of Hausa students, but less than those of Ibo students. This is exactly what one would predict if dreamlife reflects waking life.
Further contradicting the “garbage disposal theory of dreams” as dream researchers nicknamed Crick and Michelson’s assertions, there is enormous anecdotal evidence of dreams grappling with, and sometimes solving, major problems ranging from the structure of benzene to plots for prize-winning literature.[ix]More controlled problem-solving studies confirm the potential utility of dreams for this purpose.[x]Cultures that emphasize dreams as a source of guidance have even more examples of nocturnal guidance than dream-neglecting Western society. India’s greatest mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, dreamed all of his mathematical “proofs” and Mahatma Gandhi said that his non-violent protest of British rule in India originated in a dream.[xi]The Arab world consists of various sub-cultures with this type of emphasis.
Arab Dream Traditions and their Role in Previous Arab-world Events
Secular Arabic traditions have focused on the potential of dreams to foretell the future. Sometimes the prediction is assumed to be literal and obvious, while on other occasions elaborate systems of symbolic translations were consulted such as the tenth century Oneirocriticon of Achmet[xii] in which severity or even connotation often changed with the dream’s interpretation. For example:
If someone dreams that he was decapitated in battle, he will receive beneficence from a powerful man... (p.129)
If he dreams that a front tooth fell out, the closer of his kin will die... (p. 108)
If he dreams that his fingernails were pulled out, the misfortune will be even more severe, and this points to a short life... (p. 113)
In Islam, many of the foundations of the Koranwere revealed to Muhammad in his ‘night journey’ which moderate branches of Islam construe as a divinely inspired dream. Muhammad ordered the practice of adhan, the daily call to prayer from the minarets and a central ritual of Islam to this day after one of his followers dreamed of it. The split of Islam into the conflicting factions of Sunni and Shiite was based partly on a dream of Mohammed, which the Sunnis used to justify their rights as his successors.
The autobiographies of Muslim rulers often contain extensive dream diaries and examples of decisions ostensibly based on dreams. When the Shah of Iran was deciding whether to seek a loan from Russia, he dreamed that a famous theological figure dressed in primitive Muslim garb approached the Shah and threw at his feet a sack containing gold and silver. The interpretation of this dream was that the Shah shouldn't make any new loans with unbelievers but should trust that fellow servants of the faith would restore his finances. Saddam Hussein reported dreaming that Allah told him to enter and take back Kuwait just before the first Gulf War.[xiii] Before the second Gulf War, he reported a dream that a snake came upon his path but he chopped off its head with a sword which he interpreted to mean Western invaders would be vanquished.[xiv]
Contemporary Islamic militant jihadists (Mullah Omar, Osama bin Laden, Atta, Reid etc.) routinely legitimate their calling through reference to dreams, and appear to interpret night dreams as being both inspirational and even strategic in their jihad.[xv][xvi]
Because of this emphasis on dreams as foretelling the future rather than arising from the past, many Arabs who are having PTSD nightmares of an event occurring each night experience even more anxiety over whether this will indeed occur again than dreamers in other cultures. In a study of PTSD nightmares in Kuwaiti survivors of the Iraqi invasion, the dreamers were extremely likely to view dreams about horrific encounters with the Iraqi army as meaning that the Iraqis were going to return rather than simply as being about the past.[xvii]
The positive side to this emphasis on dreams foretelling the future happens when people in the midst of turmoil dream of positive outcomes. These can be a source of optimism and inspiration in Arab culture, while in Western traditions they would be dismissed as "wish fulfillment" without the beneficial impact.
Dreams Occurring before the Arab Spring
In December 2010, the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi sparked protests that toppled the government of Tunesia (where Bouazizi lived) and spread across parts of North Africa and the Middle East. In her essay, “Is there an Arab Dream? Musings at a Difficult Time in the ‘Arab Spring,’” Sarah Eltantawi[xviii] wrote from Cairo:
The air is still thick with heat. It’s the kind that sends you, exhausted, to bed midday to submit to naps so deep you are sure your cells are regenerating at accelerated speed. Your lungs ache a bit with breathing. The dreams of these naps are excessively sharp with color; the subconscious’ deepest tresses excavated, as if by divine pitchfork. The kind of dreams that give a strong cup of coffee upon awaking a feeling of a lifeline. Being forced into these dreams by nature, I wonder if they can be made of use.
If Adler’s continuity hypothesis is valid, one would expect to see aspects of the so-called “Arab Spring” in dream reports of people in those regions. And, given dream beliefs in the region, one might expect them to be “made use” of for guidance, inspiration, and warnings by many of the dreamers. In 2013, we requested our contacts in that part of the world to collect dream reports that seemed, in some way, connected to the protest movements.
Some dreams in the collection we gathered presaged the events, often by several years. Akbar (a pseudonym, as are all dreamer’s names in this essay except those of public figures), an Algerian, reported a dream from November 2002, one that he claimed reflected the spread of revolution fervor some 8 or 9 years later.
I see a mountain. It is very high and wide, and it rises from the middle of a desert. I entered one of the caves in this mountain and found a medium-sized rock incursion in the earth. Then I moved that rock aside. Once I did this, huge amounts of oil came out of the slit. It poured onto the desert and spread wide until it became a river.
One could make the case that the spreading oil is a metaphor for the way that protests appeared in several countries following Bouazizi’s suicide. However, this is a post-hoc interpretation; more likely the flowing oil mirrored the way that newly discovered oil behaves once discovered.
A more likely premonitory dream was reported by Fawzia in July 2013, an Egyptian, before Mohamed Morsi, the legitimately elected president, had been deposed in an army coup.
I am looking at Morsi and am surprised because he is dressed in tattered rags. He is the president, so why is he dressed so shabbily?
Fawzia recalled another dream a few nights later.
I see Morsi in the presidential palace. He is wearing a delicately colored suit. A military officer is asking him to go outside the palace to see the large crowd of his supporters.
Both dreams occurred very shortly before the coup. The first dream may have reflected the rumors about the army’s plan to seize power, something that Fawzia, a backer of Morsi, did not want to occur. Her second dream may have reflected her wish that Morsi remain in power. This might be an example of Freud’s “wish fulfillment,” something he thought characterized most dreams, but a phenomenon that backers of the continuity hypothesis relegate to a minority of dream reports. A very interesting variation on a wish fulfillment dream occurred in this dream of a young woman in Egypt just before the Arab Spring:
I am observing a group of women who are parading for their rights. I am not sure what country this is in. There must be several hundred women protesting the government repression. They win their battle but it is short lived. There is a new government that gives the women their rights. But soon another government comes in that abolishes the rights, and the women seem to be right back where they started from. My mood is one of disappointment.
In a way, this parallels the government overthrow and then the military coup ousting the new regime. However, this woman’s dreamed revolution was more the one she would have liked to see. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was not known for their sympathy for women's rights, and the military coup was associated with suppression of women's rights. But it is still a remarkable dream in many ways.
Majda, a young woman of the United Arab Emirates had a sober premonition of how events might go. As events were beginning to unfold in 2011, she dreamed:
I am outside of Dubai in a desert area, and look back at the skyscrapers. I think that I am lucky to be in a stable situation because as I look into the distance I see a sandstorm coming. I know it will not hit my country but I feel badly about the people who will be hurt by it. When I wake up I am sad, which is an unusual feelings for me upon awakening.
The metaphor of a sandstorm which her unconscious offered and her resulting sadness are much closer to how many of the participants might consciously view the events now than they were at the time of this dream.
An Egyptian journalist sent us his translations of three dreams that were circulated after the June 30 coup. The alleged dreamer was Abd El Fatah El Sisi, the Egyptian Minister of Defence who toppled Mohammed Morsi. These dreams were circulated by the Muslim Brotherhood in an attempt to portray El Sisi as a megalomaniac who thought that his dreams predicted the future. These dreams came from an old audio interview with El Sisi broadcast by Qatari station al Jazeera, hence they are probably authentically something El Sisi was trying to promote in the initial interview but was asking after the coup. El Sisi observed, in the interview:
I have had many dreams that came true, including these dreams from 35 years ago. I am brandishing a red word in which the religious slogan, “There is no God but Allah” was inscribed. I was wearing a large watch decorated by a very big star. The watch was the Omega brand and people kept asking me, “Why are you, not anybody else, wearing this magnificent watch?” I say to them, “This watch was made to be mine, and its name is Omega means “universality.” And that word is mine too.. In the second dream, I hear somebody say to me, “We will give you something very precious, something that nobody else has ever had.” And in the third dream the late President Anwar Sadat is saying to me, “I already knew that you would be Egypt’s next president.” I replied, “Me too.”
The first dream is quite general, and the word “Omega” is given a strange meaning, even in translation, since “Omega” is the last letter of the Greek alphabet and in the Western world is generally thought to connote finality. The final two dreams are both more recent and more specific. If El Sisi was giving an honest report, they do seem to presage actual events. However, the use of these dreams to discredit El Sisi is as provocative as the dreams themselves as it displays the Muslim belief that dreams can be premonitory. The newspaper article was meant to expose El Sisi as a self-promoter who used these dreams to enhance his own reputation.
Islamic militants indeed announced supposed premonitory dream content during the events of the Arab Spring to legitimate their positions. In a 2011 videotape produced in Syria, titled “Dream (glad tidings) of the killing of the killer/criminal/illegal Bashar at the hands of his associates,”[xix]Sheikh Mohammed Aljamal and Sheikh Hassan Al-Hussein describe dreams of others which presaged Arab Spring events which had already happened such as the killing of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya and the imprisonment of Hussnei Mubarak. They use the term "Ro'aa رُؤى" which literally means vision, but implies a divinely-inspired dream when it refers to the experience of an ordinary believer, as only prophets are assumed to have waking visions. Then Aljamal and Al-Hussein describe dreams which they imply predict the outcome of the Syrian Civil War which was in its early stages at the time. Their first example is:
This dream came before the events in Tunis. One of the good people. . . saw a group gather over a lion and they ate it. And this dream was a prophecy of the falling of the regime and the humiliation of its members.
Their interpretation hinges on the fact that the name Assad means ‘lion’ in Arabic. Indeed, in the pun-like manner of dreams which Freud dubbed “visual representation,” this image could be a rather obvious metaphor for the fall or death of Syrian President Bashar Assad. In an ironic aside, however, two years after the video was made and just as this book was going to press, major newspapers around the world flashed the headline: “Starving rebels eat lion from a Damascus zoo,”[xx]accompanied by graphic photos and video of men in the suburb Al-Ghouta butchering the unfortunate animal--eerily reminiscent of the dream account. Al-Ghouta was one of the areas hit by chemical gas attacks, and papers reported that Syrian imams had issued a fatwa that allows people living in those areas to eat meats that are normally forbidden under Islamic law, including dogs, cats and donkeys.
Aljamal and Al-Hussein’s next three examples are safer from alternative interpretations as more obvious representations of the triumph of the rebels:
The second dream is that somebody saw the flag of Syria was being placed in a coffin.
One of the imams in Lebanon narrated to me a dream that involved Syria with its houses’ doors lying open.
Another good man of Lebanon, when remembering God Almighty, was taken into sleep. When he woke up he said: “Look forward in anticipation, for I have seen the people of Syria rejoicing happily and inviting us to have breakfast feasts over there during Ramadan.”
Their last example is the most literal:
A man I consider from the good people, and he’s from Syria, narrated to me a dream that Bashar Al-Assad was killed by people around him close to him--people he trusts.
Aljamal and Al-Hussein assure listeners that these dreams mean that “Bashar will be killed by the hands of his own associates as per Sheikh-ul-Islam’s dream …. The victory is near . . . be patient. The Prophet said . . . near the [end] time, the dreams of true believers will not lie.” So far, this seems to be wishful thinking--whether by the original dreamers or by the imams in their cherry-picking of dreams. The only accurate prediction so far is the unfortunate lion; two years after the video was made, Assad still hangs onto power.
Dreams Occurring during the Arab Spring
Other dreams are contemporaneous with political events--the unconscious mind’s representation of what the waking self is witnessing. In 2011, an Indian student, Nakul, was in Cairo during the uprisings leading to the demise of the Mubarak regime when he had the following dream:
I am in a dark house that is completely unfamiliar to me. Outside there are camels that seem to be searching for me. I am terrified because I do not know how to fight camels. But I do know that they can go a long time without water so they will keep looking indefinitely. One of the camels is unusually large and savage looking. But it is very dark inside and outside, so I am able to elude them. I wake up terrified.
This young man seems to be caught up in events beyond his control, with hostile forces that are searching to destroy anyone not like themselves (in ideology, perhaps) and so the hostility is not personal. Because there is so much confusion, he is able to escape them, at least at the time he had the dream. He did return to India safely.
In 2013, Azzam, an Egyptian, reported a dream in which “an Egyptian general who had been sacked by Morsi was chasing me into a building. Canisters were being fired at him as well as at other protestors, with tear gas being emitted from small windows.” The dreamer was a supporter of Morsi who had been deposed before he had this dream. This dream may have reflected his anxiety about the military leaders who could well have tracked down and imprisoned all supporters of the former president.
Once Morsi had been deposed, the event was reflected in dreams of his Egyptian supporters and opponents. One supporter, Areed, reported a dream that he recalled in July 2013:
I dreamed that Morsi, who had been ousted by the military in June, was under detention. In this dream, I am sitting around a television set with members of his family. One of his sons attacks me verbally, even though I supported his father. Afterwards he tries to console me and apologizes. The whole family apologizes. Although I feel satisfied and tell them so, they keep apologizing. And then they stop.
This dream might reflect Areed’s disappointment with the fate of Morsi. He might have thought that some of Morsi’s actions were responsible for his loss of power, and the dream indicates the dreamer’s hope that Morsi will recognize the mistakes that he made. The family members are ambivalent about recognizing the situation but finally take some responsibility by apologizing to the dreamer and, quite likely, the other supporters who felt let down.
Ragab Ez El Deen--another Egyptian, and in this case a researcher in political science who wanted his real name included, also interjected himself into contemporary events during the Arab Spring.
I am being chased by Tantawy, a military commander who headed the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) which took over power during the transition after the Mubarak regime collapsed.. He is chasing me from house to house. I wondered how Tantwi could be so earnest in chasing me although he is such an old man. I made him believe that I have holed in a house. He stormed such house. A mob caught him when he tried to go out of the house.
In this dream, El Deen may fear that his political sentiments may put him at risk. However, there are many people who agree with him and he gets out of harm’s way. This dream could well reflect the political realities of Egypt in which shifting power structures endanger people whose allegiances differ from the group in control at any given time.
In Jordan, where King Abdullah II was responding to protests by replacing unpopular prime ministers and altering laws, a young woman, Aini, viewed the Arab Spring much more positively. In August 2012, a month after the major protests had replaced officials and a month before demonstrations over fuel prices persuaded the King to drop the price, Aini reported:
My dream started with me climbing a red mountain with someone (a distorted imp-like someone, come to think of it), and when he couldn't climb anymore he said he was going back down, and jumped all the way down from our height to the bottom. Being near the top, I struggled to the peak. But to my dismay, there was nowhere to go, so I decided to do the same as him and jump down.
Then, as I was waking up, I had a half-dream, half-daydream. I thought what if I hadn't jumped down the way I came from, but had dived over the cliff on the other side? So I did. I jumped from the cliff. Then all of a sudden I was swimming in a clear lake, with fishes underwater, complete with corals reefs. I was swimming peacefully when all of a sudden a huge shark came, probably a great white. I was wondering if I should swim for the shore, when it started to come for me. But it kept missing, and really I wasn't afraid at all. I realized that someone, or something, invisible was protecting me. A strong and reliable entity. The shark darted for me one last time, and annoyed by its persistence (that was the feeling I got), the entity took it and smashed it down, one side then the other, like a pancake.
Aini’s dream repeatedly introduced danger--the cliff, the shark. And repeatedly there was some magic entity helping her, but she also gained in efficacy herself. This seemed to reflect the nature of the protest process in Jordan: certainly scary at times, as the police stood by prepared to move in if demonstrations got too intense. But eventually, as with the shark, Aini learned she didn’t need to be too afraid and could assert herself. No doubt the dream contains many other layers of personal meaning for a young woman struggling with becoming an adult and being a woman in male-dominated world, but her role as protestor and citizen of a country engaged in change seems to be a potent part of the story.
Madhia, a teenager from Afghanistan, told our informant that, in her opinion, the Arab Spring had redefined the entire Arab culture. She continued, “Entire populations broke the silence and openly criticized the then-current state of affairs. Even in countries like Syria, where dissent is viciously marginalized, protesters continue to call for an end to state mandated oppression.” Madhia had a dream in which a voice was signing about the Arab Spring. She recalled what she could and recast the song, which she called “Dream with Me.” This translation was done by our informant.
Dream with me.
Tomorrow’s coming,
And if it doesn’t come
We will bring it ourselves.
All of our steps will lead us to our dream,
No matter how many times we fall.
We can always get up.
We can break through the darkness.
We can turn our night into a thousand days.
Dreams after the Arab Spring
The hope expressed in Madhia’s song did not last. The expected “Democratic Domino” failed to materialize. Long-time dictators were deposed in Egypt and Libya, but the governments that followed were not paragons of democracy or even of stability. An uprising in Yemen failed to take hold, and protests in other countries were repressed or simply fizzled out. Syria has been locked in a bitter civil war ever since. Some commentators[xxi] have complained that the “Arab Spring” term was the invention of Western journalists. The term is an allusion to the European revolutions of 1848, which are sometimes collectively referred to as the "Springtime of the People", and to the “Prague Spring” of 1968. These analogies to Western-style democratic revolutions may never have reflected the realities of events in the countries at the epicenter of the protests.
Amir, a high school student living in the occupied West Bank who experienced it’s turnmoil all of his life, now watches Syria’s civil war just over the border. He hears the news daily and encounters acquaintances who’ve been over the border and directly involved, but Amir has played no role in Syria. However, he finds his dream tumbling him into the battle without warning in the midst of normal teenage activities:
I was in my Jericho house, and fixed something to eat . . .and Skyped a bit and solved some chemistry questions . . . Then, I took out a rifle for my duties as a Lieutenant in the Arab Syrian Army and went on a find-and-kill mission for Free Syrian Army (FSA) members in Jericho.... I saw some FSA members sneaking to the left...I shot them down, 2 men... There was no real recoil, or any sense of shooting, nor was there blood or screams or sounds...I just aimed and they were lying dead on the ground next... I saw one of my men get shot in the head...
So he eats, chats with friends, and then war rages--a reality in that part of the Middle East that’s only gotten more exaggerated for anyone near the Syrian border. The observation that the dream lacked gritty, real-life details as people suddenly lay dead could result from the dreamer’s experiences playing video-games, not military service; but it also could be dissociation developed through a waking lifetime of witnessed violence. A couple weeks later, Amir had a dream--the only one in our sample to overtly compare Arab Spring to European struggles--but emphasizing their darkest resemblance:
I was a soldier in a militia, the black guardians, and our job was to cover the Arab Syrian Army by shooting the Free Syrian Army members... My fellow members were shooting bulls-eyes in the Free army's heads....I, on the other hand missed all my shots. Then I hit a fellow Arab Syrian Soldier...friendly fire. I saw the soldier collapse with a small burst of blood, through the scope of my sniper. I felt deep shame...not only am I failing in killing the enemy, but I am killing our own men. A bullet hit me, in the leg. I collapse.... The enemy comes....They raise me and place me in an "ambulance." It was a donkey driven cart, with the cart being fenced with wooden fence. Like a large baby's cradle... I lay motionless...
Then in the transitionless way that can only happen in dreams:
I was a French soldier injured in a battle in the early 1800s between the French and the British... I was thrown into the cart again, and dragged away.... I only showed agony and despair once we were negotiating the curb... as I was taken into the unknown....
Next thing I know, I am an Orc and loosing to a battle against the centaur demigod as the last Orc Grunt. I try diplomacy, and slash my head goes off...I hear a voice saying “Our hero has been slain,” just like the video-game I was playing right before I fell asleep.
Conflict in his own country, war in Syria, ancient battles from history books, and an intergalactic video-game swirl in a mix of permanent war. Awake, Amir does view the FSA negatively, but he’s not an admirer of the SAA. He believes the current regime may be a slightly more stable force from the perspective of the Palestinian refugee camps, but says “no side is an angel and you don’t really support a side in that sort of a free for all.” The dream’s imagery reflects that: though Amir is cast on a particular side in each scene, both sides always behave equally aggressively. And it’s a SAA member he ends up shooting. The general message seems to be all wars are hell. For Amir, the battles around him have disrupted his ability to enjoy childhood play and teenage exploration without violence and survival issues intruding.
Jasmine, who lives in Morocco, reported a gentler if perhaps equally sad dream:
I am watching a scene in the desert. Some lovely flowers were blooming. Their colors are remarkable, like something I had not seen in my waking life. But the colors begin to fade and the plants begin to die. Soon there is nothing there but sand, shifting sand.
This dream could well be a metaphor for the dashed hopes of the Arab Spring. Jasmine lives in a country barely touched by either the successes or failures of the protests. As a result, she can distance herself from these events and give a reaction that does not put her in the middle of the action, as was the case with the Egyptian and Palestinian/Syrian border dreamers.
Naval, a man viewing these events from India has an equally removed perspective and his dreams perhaps incorporate more sense of the partial successes, partial failures and continuing nature of the story:
I am watching a herd of horses running over a desert. They are all very strong and very powerful. They seem to be Arabian horses and I think that they represent various countries in the region. Suddenly, the horses go off in their own direction and there is no more unity. The horses do not turn against each other; they simply run off toward different parts of the desert. I feel sad that they could not longer stay the common course.
Conclusion
Our review of Arab Spring dreams supports Alfred Adler's thesis of continuity between dream life and waking life. Each of the dream reports we have cited is a reflection of actual events before, during, or after that period of history and/or the dreamer's reaction to those events. Our review also mirrors many Arabic traditions regarding dreams, suggesting that future historians include reported dreams as an important supplement to their descriptions of the social and political movements, and their sequels, that they study. These occurrences would be more thoroughly understood if dream reports were added to first-person interviews, post-hoc ruminations, media presentations, and other customary data sources. Without paying attention to unconscious dynamics, a historical record of critical world and region events is lacking layers of it’s psychological causation and meaning.
[i] We would like to thank DreamsCloud.com and Dr. Iain Edgar for their help in locating relevant dreams.
[ii]Crick, Francis, and Graeme Mitchison. "The function of dream sleep." Nature 304, no. 5922 (1983): 111-114.
[iii]White, Olivia L., Daniel D. Lee, and Haim Sompolinsky. "Short-term memory in orthogonal neural networks." arXiv preprint cond-mat/0402452 (2004).
[v]Hall, Calvin, S., and Robert Van de Castle (1966). The content analysis of dreams. East Norwalk, CT, US: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
[vi]Domhoff, G. William. The scientific study of dreams: Neural networks, cognitive development, and content analysis. American Psychological Association, 2003.
[vii]Prasad, B. "Content analysis of dreams of Indian and American college students: A cultural comparison." Journal of Indian Psychology (1982).
[viii]Monroe, R.L., Nerlove, S., and R. Daniels. “Effects of population density on food concerns in three East African societies.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 10, (1969): 161-171.
[ix] Barrett, D. (2001). The committee of sleep: How artists, scientists, and athletes use dreams for creative problem-solving–and how you can too. Crown/Random House.
[x]Barrett, Deirdre. "The" committee of sleep": A study of dream incubation for problem solving." Dreaming, 3, no. 2 (1993): 115.
[xii]Oberhelman, S. M. (Ed.). (1991). The Oneirocriticon of Achmet: a medieval Greek and Arabic treatise on the interpretation of dreams. Texas Tech University Press.
[xv]Washington Post (2001). Text: Bin Laden Discusses Attacks on Tape, Dec. 13.
[xvi]Edgar, Iain. R. “The Dream Will Tell: Militant Muslim Dreaming in the Context of Traditional and Contemporary Islamic Dream Theory and Practice.” Dreaming, 1, no. 41 (2004): 21.
[xvii]Barrett, Deirdre and Behbehani, Jaffar (2003). Post-Traumatic Nightmares in Kuwait Following the Iraqi Invasion. In Krippner, Stanley, and Teresa M. McIntyre, eds. The psychological impact of war trauma on civilians: An international perspective. Greenwood Publishing Group, 135.
[xviii] Eltantawi, Sarah (2012). “Is there an Arab Dream? Musings at a Difficult Time in the ‘Arab Spring,’“ Muftah: Free and Open Debate from Morocco to Pakistan, Oct. 31 http://muftah.org/is-there-an-arab-dream-thoughts-from-a-difficult-moment-in-the-arab-spring/Retrieved 11/20/13.
[xix]Bastawy, Mahmoud (2011). Dream (glad tidings) of the killing of the killer/criminal/illegal Bashar by the hands of his [own] associates. YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exgJAKIkaIk&feature=related Retrieved 11/20/13.
[xx]The Times “Starving rebels eat lion from a Damascus zoo” Nov 29, 2013 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/middleeast/article3935102.eceRetrieved Nov 30th, 2013.
[xxi]Alhassen Maytha (2012). Please Reconsider the Term "Arab Spring" Huffington Post, Feb. 10 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maytha-alhassen/please-reconsider-arab-sp_b_1268971.html Retrieved 11/20/13.
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The research reflected in this chapter was supported by the Saybrook University Chair for the Study of Consciousness.
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