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Meeting professors from other parts of the world can enrich understandings, not only of other places, but of practices in the U.S., as well.
Thanks to funds from the Marsico Initiative and from the Undergraduate Research Center, students heard presentations from Visiting Scholar Dr. Rivka Ribak of Haifa University. She offered a public presentation titled, “People of the Book: Resistances to the Media in Israel,”which presented research from a Haifa MA student who explored the practice among Palestinian young women who, going against tradition of their families, acquired cell phones from boyfriends. She observed that cell phones could provide ways of rebelling, but that these practices weren't always emancipatory, as the young women then were indebted to their boyfriends. More recently, Palestinian families have become more open to the idea of women carrying cell phones, thus purchasing them for their daughters and potentially cutting out the boyfriend's potential influence. She also presented research on cell phone use among Israeli teens to a class of more than 30 undergraduates, and provided leadership in an invited symposium that involved undergraduates and graduate students as well as faculty from the University of Denver, University of Colorado-Boulder, and Colorado State University. The symposium gave undergraduate students an opportunity to discuss research on an even playing field within the context of a group that included their peers up to full professors. Currently serving as a Visiting Professor at the University of Tennessee, Dr. Ribak is an internationally known scholar whose research focuses on the construction of political and gender identities through the media and the domestication of technologies into homes and into the Kibbutz. She is a cultural studies scholar whose interdisciplinary ethnographic work has been of interest to those in media studies, religious studies, anthropology, and gender studies. Please contact
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