Critical Review of Social Sciences and Humanities

From Imposed Silence to Selfhood

2026-07-26T16:58:54+00:00

For centuries, the subjugation of Black women has remained a global tragedy, rooted in racial and patriarchal hegemony. Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Color Purple (1982), vividly encapsulates this intersectional struggle within the African American community, illustrating a rigid gender stratification divided into patriarchal rulers and subjugated women. This study provides a qualitative, womanist critique of the novel, examining the domestic injustices that enforced Black women to silence and trauma. Utilizing Patricia Hill Collins’s black feminist thought as a theoretical framework, the research analyzes the harrowing trajectory of the protagonist, Celie. Initially trapped in a cycle of domestic brutality and sexual violence inflicted by her stepfather and later her husband, Celie’s destiny appears to be fabricated by male tyranny. However, the study illuminates how despite the imposed subjugation, Celie holds enough courage for her eventual liberation. This emancipation is catalyzed by the transformative power of a marginalized female community.

Radical Feminism and Female Resilience

2026-07-24T10:18:01+00:00

The current study aims to provide an interpretation of the Do Patti (2024) movie using the Radical feminist theory perspective. Portrayal of women and gender-based violence is a common and growing trend in Bollywood movies, although the movie Do Patti (2024) dealing with domestic violence has not been subjected to such analysis. The current paper will focus on interpreting the representation of patriarchy, domestic violence, and female agency in the film. This qualitative study adopts a hermeneutic interpretive approach to examine the ideological and thematic dimensions of the film. It will apply the theoretical framework of Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, and bell hooks known as Radical Feminist Theory. Judith Herman’s theory of trauma will be another theoretical framework used to analyze the Do Patti’s central themes. The analysis demonstrates how Do Patti portrays gender-based violence as a structural manifestation of patriarchal power rather than merely an individual act of violence. Moreover, the study elaborates on the depiction of female agency and domestic violence and to what extent the movie challenges patriarchy and gender stereotypes. the study also contributes in addressing the research problem by analyzing Do Patti (2024) with recourse to the Radical Feminist Theory and elaborating the themes of patriarchy, gender-based violence, and female agency in the movie.

World-Making through Imagination

2026-07-25T11:37:08+00:00

This paper examines the constitutive role of imagination in shaping the protagonists' perception of reality in Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia and Amna Mufti's Pani Mar Raha Hai. While existing scholarship has explored these novels through theological, ecocritical, and symbolic perspectives, little attention has been paid to the ways in which imagination functions as a reality-shaping force in both texts. Drawing on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's concept of the esemplastic imagination as articulated in Biographia Literaria, this study employs a qualitative comparative textual analysis to investigate how imagination transcends its conventional role as a psychological or aesthetic faculty and actively constructs alternative modes of experiencing reality. The analysis demonstrates that imagination enables the protagonists to create symbolic worlds that provide emotional refuge, negotiate trauma, and redefine their engagement with the material world. In both novels, the boundaries between imagination and reality become increasingly permeable, allowing imagined experiences to influence characters' identities, choices, and understanding of loss. By placing an American children's novel alongside a contemporary Urdu novel, this study highlights the cross-cultural significance of Coleridge's theory and contributes to comparative literary scholarship by demonstrating that imagination operates as a constitutive force capable of reshaping lived reality rather than merely escaping from it.

Cognitive Demand and Curriculum Alignment in a Pakistani Grade 11 English Textbook`

2026-07-27T03:36:46+00:00

This study investigates how end-of-unit exercises in the 2025 Grade 11 English textbook prescribed in Punjab reflect the cognitive expectations of the National Curriculum of Pakistan for English (Advanced/Elective), Grades XI–XII. Using revised Bloom’s Taxonomy as an interpretive framework, it treats the exercise prompt, or a separable sub-item within a multifunctional prompt, as the unit of analysis. Cognitive demand was determined from the required operation, expected response, and evaluative criteria, while instructional verbs and item formats served as contextual indicators. The study is framed as an exploratory qualitative content analysis because the available analytic record does not permit a fully disambiguated frequency distribution or calculation of inter-rater reliability. A fourteen-unit matrix reveals a recurring pattern: literary and extended non-fiction tasks often require structural analysis, evidence-based judgement, comparison, argument, and original composition, whereas vocabulary and grammar activities support recall, comprehension, and procedural practice. However, this distinction is not absolute, since selected-response items may involve inference and open-ended prompts may remain cognitively limited. Overall, the textbook shows meaningful but uneven alignment with higher-order reading and writing outcomes across genres and skills. Findings concern printed task design only; classroom implementation, learner performance, teacher capacity, examination washback, and equity remain directions for future research.

Voices Across Scripts

2026-07-06T07:57:40+00:00

Psycho-Forensic Linguistic Surveillance Initiative (PFLSI) established, respectively, through series papers 1, 2 and 3 of the a small culturally rich corpus of Pakistani suicide notes (N=140) and a large-scale, statistically rigorous English-language Suicide Discourse Corpus (452,000 tokens). Series Paper 3 unified these findings theoretically and specified the seven-layer PFLS pipeline architecture, identifying its Layer L3 Cultural Calibration module as dependent on lexical resources that do not yet exist at corpus scale: a validated, quantitatively analyzed body of Urdu- and Punjabi-medium suicidal discourse. This paper addresses that dependency directly. It is a corpus-construction and protocol paper, not a results paper: it specifies the design of a Multilingual Suicide Discourse Corpus (M-SDC) comprising native-script Urdu and Punjabi (Shanmukhi) text together with Roman-Urdu code-switched digital discourse, sourced through ethically governed partnerships with Pakistani crisis helplines, moderated mental-health forums, and re-digitized original-language transcription of the Series Paper 1 note corpus. We specify target corpus scale (a proposed 500,000-token Urdu/Punjabi Suicide Discourse Corpus and a matched 500,000-token control corpus), a code-switch annotation scheme adapted from the CALCS shared-task tradition, an izzat-register lexicon derived inductively from Series Paper 1's qualitative findings, and an inter-annotator reliability protocol targeting Cohen's kappa above 0.75 for semantic-domain tags. Because data collection has not yet been completed at the time of writing, we present anticipated findings as a set of pre-registered, directional hypotheses rather than as reported results, and we provide placeholder result tables whose structure mirrors that of Series Paper 2 so that outcomes will be directly comparable across languages once collection concludes. We contend that the absence of such a corpus limits the empirical validation of the PFLS cultural calibration layer and constrains automated detection in linguistically underrepresented populations.