Journal of Research in Humanities

Perilous Journeys to Peaceful Lands in the Quest for a Better Life: Migration Literature as a Space of Negotiation for New Climate Solidarities

Syeda Memoona Ali, Syrrina Ahsan Ali Haque — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper investigates Europe’s most pressing refugee/asylum seeker/immigrant crisis to bridge the knowledge gap between the host nations’ border control, immigration, and integration policies and the human stories of perilous journeys in search of peaceful lands with the help of Nadia Hashmi’s novel When the Moon is Low (2015). The paper explores the ways migration literature can help in overcoming the narrative gap in the recent European refugee/asylum seeker/immigrant management policies. Furthermore, by taking an issue with the European detention centers and their living conditions, the paper highlights the disparity in the myth of equal human rights. The study hopes to open debates around the issue that will decolonize the Eurocentric refugee narrative around immigration and integration policy, place it in a relational and global perspective and suggest a human-rights-oriented frame for reimaging an inclusive migration discourse for the twenty-first century. The paper employs Anibal Quijano’s ‘coloniality of knowledge’ framework to fill the knowledge gap in the Eurocentric immigrant discourse through a literary lens to humanize it and locate alternate epistemologies

Dis-Ability: A Trialectics of Material, Imagined and Lived Spatialities in Beckettian Theatre

Tehmina Yasmeen, Farah Hashmi — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Grounded in the broader existential limitation-and-dependency paradigm, dis-ability emerges as both an embodied reality and an extended metaphor in Beckett’s plays, manifested through categorically dis-abled characters. In this study, I employ Edward Soja’s theorisation of space, referred to as the “Trialectics of Spatiality” (Suja 57), as a framework for examining the dialectics of dis-ability and space in Beckettian theatre. By applying Soja’s concepts of first, second, and third space as analytical lenses, this study investigates how Beckett’s characters exist in dis/harmony with the conventional portrayals of dis-ability found in canonical literature. Furthermore, using this heuristic approach as a foundation, the research aims to define the poetics of the Beckettian model of dis-ability intricately woven into the narratives of his plays. The study is limited to a textual analysis of Waiting for Godot (1953), Endgame (1957), and Happy Days (1961) to ensure the analytical soundness of the arguments. From the first-space perspective, I concentrate on the embodied materiality of Beckett’s characters and the physical spaces they inhabit in the selected texts. Through the second space lens, I explore the implications of the characters’ imaginative situatedness as dis-abled beings, focusing on their desires, hopes, and actions as they relate to the plot of the chosen texts. Adopting the third space as a framework, I analyse the Beckettian universe as a liminal and hybrid space where the material and imaginative aspects collaborate to deconstruct the socially constructed binary of normalcy and disability. In doing so, I interpret Beckett’s selected texts as illustrations of the third space, wherein real-life perceptions and their literary representations of normalcy and dis-ability hybridise into an interdependent mode of human existence.

A Case Study of Nuances of Victimology in Coben’s Fool Me Once: Novel and Adaptation

Eman Rehman, Rida Akhtar Ghumman — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This research aims to extrapolate tangents of the process that ascribe meaning to the noun victim and how it transmutes into a verb – understanding victimology as a term through the story of Maya in Harlan Coben’s novel and its television adaptation by employing qualitative analysis as research methodology. It seeks to delineate identity alteration caused by trauma, to discern gender as a parameter in victimization and coping and to trace secondary victimization across minor characters. This study reveals that Coben’s narrative has portrayed the metamorphic cycle of trauma, reflecting its evolution from victimhood into moral insurgency. It is a multidisciplinary initiative in understanding the literariness of modern television adaptations. Deeper nuances of psychological turmoil come to light as the characters of the said corpus build themselves around a typically piquant Coben plot: rich in turbulence, existential dread and a class struggle, Fool Me Once (2016; 2024) is a textured tale of psychic morbidity and its resultant criminal deviance whose merit lies in aligning literary analysis with applied social insight, revealing how crime fiction echoes real world dynamics of victimization.

The Endangered Ideals of Democratic Transhumanism in Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous

Aliza Niaz Khan, Faiza Anum — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Drawing on James Hughes’ postulations on transhumanism in Citizen Cyborg (2004), this paper explores Annalee Newitz’s novel Autonomous (2017) as a blueprint of the endangered ideals of democratic transhumanism. With close reference to the text, the focus is to probe the degradation of autonomy, accessibility, and the fundamental right to free existence for all sentient beings in the 22nd-century hyper-technologized world. It is thus argued that Autonomous uncovers the endangered ideals of democratic transhumanism, such as the fear of exacerbating global inequalities, and the degradation of personhood and autonomy as a consequence of Capitalism. Moreover, this paper suggests a solution-oriented ideology of democratic transhumanism – an ethical approach to using emerging technologies, such as the universal availability of future technological enhancements. Ultimately, it suggests that democratic transhumanist choices are significant for the consequential future, resulting from our present-day decisions for liberation under fair governance rather than enslavement under corporate oppression

Rethinking Time in Postcolonial Fiction: A Study of Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

Zarnab Hassan — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This research examines the nonlinear and spectral representation of time in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka. The study analyzes how the novel departs from traditional linear models of time by engaging with concepts such as relational time, hetero-temporality, and lived duration. Using an interdisciplinary framework that draws upon physics, historiography, and literary theory, the research demonstrates that the novel portrays time as fragmented, recursive, and ethically significant. It foregrounds that Karunatilaka’s spectral narrative structure reflects a postcolonial condition where memory, trauma, and historical violence are entangled across human and planetary dimensions. The findings suggest that the novel offers a new narrative logic: one that challenges dominant historical paradigms and reimagines temporality as a relational and moral force within postcolonial literature.

Political Polarization and Societal Struggles in Pakistan: A Dialogic Exploration of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Tania Shabir Shaikh, Sahar Afshan — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Following qualitative research, the empirical study has engaged educators in an online inter-university dialogue to explore their perceptions of the socio-political realities of the contemporary world, with reference to the play Waiting for Godot. Participants were engaged in dialogue via Google Circles. Using Google Docs in groups, participants liaised digitally about the selected play, which is common across the curricula of public-sector universities across Pakistan. Since the present study engages educators in dialogue exchange, Bakhtin’s theory of Dialogism (1984) has guided this study. The collected data from participants’ written dialogic exchange transcripts via Google Circles was analyzed using the Thematic Analysis model, explicated by Saldana (2015). The key arguments based on the findings demonstrate that participants discussed and connected to the socio-political realities of contemporary Pakistan in the play, where both the literary plot and the real world reflect the state of hopeless waiting, dissatisfaction, and uncertainty. In both, power dominance is shaped by political polarization, socioeconomic inequalities, and systemic flaws. The findings are valuable for curriculum designers, literature instructors, and researchers in dialogic teaching as they provide significant insights into arguments for socio-political turbulent tides and their reflection in the literary world.