The role of higher education institutions in laying the foundations of sustainable development is undeniable. As the principal educators of tomorrow’s leaders, such institutions can tremendously contribute to implementing and achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Many studies highlighted the significance of the students’ awareness and the level of their active engagement as crucial elements in achieving the desired results. Therefore, measuring such awareness and its effect on their daily life and behavior is fundamental in implementing the SDGs. The current study employs an online survey to explore the awareness level of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Saudi universities. SPSS will be utilized to generate the statistical results of the study. The importance of this study stems from the scarcity of research in the field, especially in Saudi higher education institutions. The current research fills in a significant gap at the national level as it provides future researchers and higher education leaders with the much-needed data to prepare strategic plans for future enhancement of the application of the SDGs. It will also propose a set of practical strategies that can be advanced to augment Saudi students’ awareness of the SDGs and their possible application in their daily lives and practices.

The purpose of this study is to validate the role of social media among peers in a virtual community of practice, VCoP, by applying the Delphi technique of data collection and analysis. The study adopts the Grounded Theory methodology to identify the theoretical frame that is developed from the data analysis. The research design identified the areas of social and professional support from Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs from the faculty members’ responses that were chosen by “purposive sampling” rather than random sampling The qualitative data collection took three months, wherein 26 faculty members interacting on WhatsApp during COVID-19 were identified as experts: one of the corner elements of the Delphi technique. The thematic analysis of the results indicated that fulfilling Maslow’s needs was an integral component of social media VCoP. However, unlike Maslow’s model, expressions of the need for safety, belonging, self-esteem, and self-actualization took turns as the most important need depending on changing context, gender, and individual preferences. The answer to the research questions, thus, becomes embedded in the research methodology that involves instructors’ perceptions as a validating element of the findings. The main recommendation is to replicate the study in various contexts to monitor faculty well-being to reach a sustainable educational environment.

Louis Montrose's "Professing the Renaissance: the Poetics and Politics of Culture" renewed concern with the historical, social and political conditions of literary productions (1989). He suggested a platform through which autonomous aesthetics and academic issues to be understood as inextricably linked to other discourses. While autobiography is considered as a "writing back," I argue here that it is rather a strategic transitional act that connects the past with the present and remaps the future. Though a very personal opening, autobiography is seen as a documentation of public events from a personal perspective. Academic autobiographies like Arab American history professor Leila Ahmad's A Border Passage from Cairo to America; A Woman’s Journey (2012) and African American theology professor Amina Wadud’s Inside the Gender Jihad (2008) are two examples of the production of interwoven private and public histories. The personal opening in such narratives is an autonomous act that initiates cross-disciplinary dialogues that trigger empowerment and proposes future changes. In that sense, these autobiographies are far from being mere stories of the past. Conversely, they are tools of rereading one's contributions and thus repositioning the poetics and politics of culture as testimonial narratives. Employing post-colonial, Islamic feminism and new historicism, the aim of this study is to critically read the above academic/personal two autobiographies as examples of the private/ public negotiations of culture. It also aims to explore the dialogue between the literary, historical and social elements as they remap the future of women in Muslim societies and the diaspora.Keywords: New Historicism, Women in Islam, personal narratives, Amina Wadud, Leila Ahmed, post-colonialism, autobiography, non-white feminism

While the reliance on machine translation (MT) for day-to-day translation needs continues to grow, research on Arabic MT still lags behind that of other languages. This gap is largely attributed to the complexity and richness of Arabic semantics, grammar, and terminology (Shaalan, 2005). Translating culturally embedded texts from Arabic remains particularly challenging, as such texts require extensive post-editing and the incorporation of extralinguistic knowledge—a skill that demands specialized training and expertise. This study addresses this gap by investigating how the presence or absence of relevant cultural knowledge influences the quality of post-MT editing of texts containing direct or indirect cultural references. To this end, a set of post-editing techniques was introduced in the training of translation students and future editors. The empirical research involved two groups of five senior translation students: one group received preparatory training on cultural terms, while the other performed the post-editing task without such preparation (Hansen 2017). A qualitative comparative analysis was employed to evaluate the students’ outputs. The findings highlight the crucial role of extralinguistic and cultural preparation in enhancing the accuracy and appropriateness of post-MT edited texts. The study underscores the need to integrate cultural awareness into translation pedagogy to ensure that MT can be effectively and professionally leveraged in Arabic translation contexts.