"Bringing these writings together for the first time, Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi provides one of the most gripping accounts of the Iraqi conflict."--Jacket.

This volume collects together Salam Pax's writings to tell the story of the war in Iraq from inside that besieged country. It provides a gripping perspective on the conflict and its aftermath.

Since the fall of Bagdad, women’s voices have been largely erased, but four months after Saddam Hussein’s statue fell, a 24 year-old woman from Baghdad began blogging. In 2003, a twenty-four-year-old woman from Baghdad began blogging about life in the city under the pseudonym Riverbend. Her passion, honesty, and wry idiomatic English made her work a vital contribution to our understanding of post-war Iraq—and won her a large following. Baghdad Burning is a quotidian chronicle of Riverbend’s life with her family between April 2003 and September of 2004. She describes rolling blackouts, intermittent water access, daily explosions, gas shortages and travel restrictions. She also expresses a strong stance against the interim government, the Bush administration, and Islamic fundamentalists like Al Sadr and his followers. Her book “offers quick takes on events as they occur, from a perspective too often overlooked, ignored or suppressed” (Publishers Weekly). “Riverbend is bright and opinionated, true, but like all voices of dissent worth remembering, she provides an urgent reminder that, whichever governments we struggle under, we are all the same.” —Booklist “Feisty and learned: first-rate reading for any American who suspects that Fox News may not be telling the whole story.” —Kirkus

Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran,Marjane Satrapi’s comics, and “Baghdad Blogger” Salam Pax’s Internet diary are just a few examples of the new face of autobiography in an age of migration, globalization, and terror. But while autobiography and other genres of life writing can help us attend to people whose experiences are frequently unseen and unheard, life narratives can also be easily co-opted into propaganda. In Soft Weapons, Gillian Whitlock explores the dynamism and ubiquity of contemporary life writing about the Middle East and shows how these works have been packaged, promoted, and enlisted in Western controversies. Considering recent autoethnographies of Afghan women, refugee testimony from Middle Eastern war zones, Jean Sasson’s bestsellers about the lives of Arab women, Norma Khouri’s fraudulent memoir Honor Lost, personal accounts by journalists reporting the war in Iraq, Satrapi’s Persepolis, Nafisi’s book, and Pax’s blog, Whitlock explores the contradictions and ambiguities in the rapid commodification of life memoirs. Drawing from the fields of literary and cultural studies, Soft Weapons will be essential reading for scholars of life writing and those interested in the exchange of literary culture between Islam and the West.

An overview of the weblog and blogging phenomenon - what are weblogs?, history, who creates weblogs?; types of weblogs; common features; moblogging; RSS and its use in weblogs. -- Weblogs as sources of current information - how useful are weblogs as sources of information?; evaluating weblogs as sources of information; some examples of quality weblogs (in social sciences, books and reading, news and current events, technology). -- Finding weblogs - it's not easy!; directories of weblogs; search engines for weblogs; other strategies. -- Weblogs in the field of library and information science - overview; weblogs dealing with library and information science as a topic; weblogs covering specialist topics in library and information science; weblogs created by professional associations and organisations; weblogs created by library and information schools; weblogs created by individual librarians (the 'blogging librarian'); finding weblogs in this field. -- Weblogs created by libraries: the state of the art - library weblogs; investigating library weblogs; what kinds of libraries are creating weblogs?; purposes for which libraries are creating weblogs; content of the weblogs created by libraries; how libraries are creating and maintaining their weblogs; some examples of library weblogs; evaluation of the library weblogs. -- Creating a weblog: the options - overview of the options; free weblog software options; commercial weblog software options; 'roll your own'; weblog hosting - free services; weblog hosting - commercial services; weblog hosting - the library's own web server; add-ons to spice up a weblog; moblogging; RSS feeds. -- Managing the library weblog - an overview of management issues associated with a library weblog; planning for the implementation of a library weblog; making the technical decisions; identifying the potential users of the library weblog; making decisions about and managing content and other features; making decisions about and managing interactivity; allocating staff time for weblog development and maintenance; budgeting for the weblog; promoting the weblog; evaluating the weblog project. -- Sources of information about weblogs - printed sources; web-based sources; weblogs about weblogs and blogging .

Is there more to qualitative data collection than face-to-face interviews? Answering with a resounding 'yes', this book introduces the reader to a wide array of exciting and novel techniques for collecting qualitative data in the social and health sciences. Collecting Qualitative Data offers a practical and accessible guide to textual, media and virtual methods currently under-utilised within qualitative research. Contributors from a range of disciplines share their experiences of implementing a particular technique, provide step-by-step guidance to using that approach, and highlight both the potential and pitfalls. From gathering blog data to the story completion method to conducting focus groups online, the methods and data types featured in this book are ideally suited to student projects and other time- and resource-limited research. In presenting several innovative ways that data can be collected, new modes of scholarship and new research orientations are opened up to student researchers and established scholars alike.

This book presents a state-of-the-art overview of the relationship between globalization studies and literature and literary studies, and the bearing that they have on each other. It engages with the manner in which globalization is thematized in literary works, examines the relationship between globalization theory and literary theory, and discusses the impact of globalization processes on the production and reception of literary texts. Suman Gupta argues that, while literature has registered globalization processes in relevant ways, there has been a missed articulation between globalization studies and literary studies. Examples are given of some of the ways in which this slippage is now being addressed and may be taken forward, taking up such themes as the manner in which anti-globalization protests and world cities have figured in literary works; the ways in which theories of postmodernism and postcolonialism, familiar in literary studies, have diverged from and converged with globalization studies; and how industries to do with the circulation of literature are becoming globalized. This book is intended for university-level students and teachers, researchers, and other informed readers with an interest in the above issues, and serves as both a survey of the field and an intervention within it.