An Existential Anthropological Study of Selfhood, Uncertainty and Resilience Among Youth of Tando Ghulam Ali, Sindh

This study combines three orientations, namely existential thought about the meaning of ‘being’ and ‘existence, ’ phenomenological insights into ‘lived experience, ’ and anthropological endeavor at what it means to be human. It attempts to focus on the human conditions by directly engaging with human beings. Specifically guiding itself with the questions such as how young people engage in the meaning-making of their lived experiences in their life course’s ever-changing process. Taking its theoretical insights and inspiration from existential and phenomenological anthropology, by zooming in on lived experiences, the research was conducted using life story interviews to collect the narratives to gain understandings into the life-worlds as it is lived and made sense of by young people of Tando Ghulam Ali, a rural town of District Badin, Sindh. Based on the ethnographic data and observations, it is argued that the meaning-making of lived experiences was different among research participants with a strong presence of selfhood and self-consciousness temporally and affectively; the difference in orientation towards life is entangled with personal history as well. This research went beyond the horizons of culture and society to put existence, life, and being, which are silhouetted at meta-level, at the heart of anthropological focus. This research is an experimental research project in anthropology, which has attempted to step its foot into the human condition's terra incognita, which calls for anthropologists’ further exploration.

Investigation of Envelope Solitons and Modulational Instability in Multicomponent Plasmas

The study of nonlinear wave propagation in plasmas is an emerging area of research to understand of energy or particle transport phenomenon in space, astrophysical and laboratory plasmas. In this work, modulational instability and envelope solitons excitations of electrostatic plasma waves in dilute plasmas are studied in the presence and absence of magnetic field in multicomponent plasmas. Envelope solitons are excited in a plasma medium when wave dispersion due to group velocity is balanced with nonlinearity of the medium. The excitation, propagation, stability of envelope modulated soliton structures and freak/rogue waves in different multicomponent plasmas are discussed. Plasma models comprised of electron-positron-ion, electronion- dust are considered with and without magnetic field for static and dynamic dust charged particles. Both positive and negative polarities of static charged dust particles are taken and studied their effects on propagation characteristics of nonlinear structures. The thermal (Maxwellian distribution) as well as nonthermal (kappa distributions function) for light mass plasmas species such as electrons and positrons, are considered to describe the excitations and stability of envelope solitons in space plasmas. The well known Krylov-Bogoliubov-Mitropolsky (KBM) method is applied to derive nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLSE) for amplitude modulation of the plasma waves. This method is useful for explaining the long time behavior of the solution which consists of varying the wave amplitude so slowly that no secular term arises in the solution. The analytical and numerical investigations of NLSE are presented for different plasmas systems. The modulational instability and its growth rate are also discussed in detail. The stable and unstable regions for Ion acoustic wave (IAW), Dust-ion acoustic wave (DIAW), Dust-ion cyclotron wave (DICW), Dust acoustic wave (DAW) and Dust cyclotron wave (DCW) are investigated for the formation of dark or bright envelope solitons. The role of different plasma parameters like, plasmas density, temperature, spectral index, dust polarity, magnetic field and propagation angle on the stability of nonlinear envelope soliton structures are presented. The observations and propagation of fundamental rogue waves (RWs) and super RWs in space plasmas and in laboratory experiments are also pointed out.