Marwan M Kraidy
Biographic Data
| ID | 98675 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marwan M Kraidy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marwan M |
| FAMILY NAME | Kraidy |
| SIGNATURE | KRAIDY M M |
| AFFILIATIONS | California University of Pennsylvania |
| ORCID | 0009-0000-9203-1565 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 334 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
From interAsian to transAsian digitalities: Reimagining digital research beyond a Western frame
This introductory paper to a special issue on InterAsian digitalities proposes the term TransAsian digitalities as an epistemology and a methodology to research digital life outside of a Western frame, in parts of the world where the fraught relationship between human beings and technological devices and platforms is vibrant and understudied. The introduction retraces the origin of TransAsian digitalities which is part of a broader set of researc…
Neo-anachronism? The coiled temporalities of South-South media flows
This article mobilizes Jesus Martín Barbero’s magnum opus, Communication, Culture, and Hegemony, towards a better understanding of the contemporary global success of Turkish television drama, known as dizi, in Latin America, the land of the once-mighty telenovela. Hilighting Martín-Barbero’s centrality to my own intellectual project on the transnational connection and transcultural resonances between the Middle East and Latin America, I draw on p…
Northwestern University in Qatar: A Distinctive Global University
Founded in 2008 through a partnership between Northwestern University and Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development (QF), Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q) educates creative, ethical, and impactful communicators, and contributes both to Northwestern's excellence and the rise of Qatar as a knowledge-based society. NU-Q's vision is multidisciplinary, multimodal, multilingual, and focused on the Global South as an intel…
From Dazzle to Diesel
The rise of Turkish television drama series-or dizi as they are known in Turkey-is one of the most notable media phenomena of the past decade in francophone West Africa, particularly Guinea. This is taking place at a time when Turkey has significantly ramped up its economic, political, and cultural investments in Africa, with countries such as Guinea, rich in natural resources and with geostrategic sea access, rapidly emerging as new targets for …
Neo-Ottoman cool west: The drama of Turkish drama in the Bulgarian public sphere
This article explores the distribution, popularity, and contestation of Turkish television series (dizi) in Bulgaria. How could dizi become popular in Bulgaria, after 500 years of imperial Ottoman history and socialist reproductions of hostile Turkish stereotypes? What is the Bulgarian public sphere's reaction to this paradoxical development? Based on a close reading of more than 71 articles from Bulgarian sources, we address these questions with…
Watching Turkish television dramas in Argentina: Entangled Proximities and Resigned Agency in Global Media Flows
For decades, the theory of cultural proximity, which states that audiences prefer culturally proximal content (Straubhaar, 1991), has remained a major framework to explain audience preferences. We show how transnational media flows have challenged its contemporary applicability. To probe this, we focus on a recent, intriguing, and still understudied development: the success of Turkish television dramas (dizi) in Latin America, the land where the …
Transnational Feelings: Digital Affect as a Global Analytic
This panel examines the role of affect in transnational digital media, offering fine-grained analyses of online communities and media artifacts which contend with and carve out contested futures. In doing so, it offers digital affect as an analytic for contending with interdependent realities. Through qualitative interviews, close readings, and textual analyses, these projects engage in a range of approaches to trace the digital affects which cir…
The Pot of Race War and the Kettle of Holy War
Two recent books, one about violent Islamist networks and the other about the white power movement, find that they have some traits in common. The seeds for each were sown by US military interventions from Vietnam to Iraq, and they have both proved adept at adapting media formats for propaganda purposes
Depoliticizing Politics: Egypt’s Media Boycotts in the Turkish Media
By focusing on public discourse about the 2013 Egyptian boycott of Turkish television series, this paper analyzes the rarely discussed “media boycott” phenomenon in media studies. By examining the discursive chasms of Turkish Press and entertainment media through a critical discourse analysis (CDA), we investigate how the Turkish dailies take a position to determine the boycotting issue to the public, and enquire into the politics around the boyc…
The Lebanese Rise Up Against a Failed System
Protests against a dysfunctional and corrupt political class have erupted nationwide, crossing sectarian divides. A frustrated younger generation, unscarred by the civil war, is in the vanguard
Boycotting Neo-Ottoman Cool: Geopolitics and Media Industries in the Egypt-Turkey Row over Television Drama
In the 2000s, Turkish-Arab relations warmed up, and the rising popularity of Turkish television dramas in the Arab world was part of an overall ‘zero-problem with neighbors’ realignment initiated by Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development party ( AKP ). However, Turkey’s involvement in the Arab uprisings complicated this rapprochement. The Turkish government, given their doctrinal proximity, supported the Muslim Brotherhood governments that were …
Media and Communications
Developments in digital technologies over the last 30 years have expanded massively human beings' capacity to communicate across time and space (Section 13.1).Media infrastructures have simultaneously acquired huge complexity.By "media" we mean technologies for the production, dissemination, and reception of communication, but also the contents distributed through those technologies and the institutions associated with their production, dissemina…
Biopolitical and Phenomenological Underpinnings of Embodied Contestation: Further Reflections on Creative Insurgency
A Tale of Two Modernities: What two preeminent scholars in Saudi Arabia and Latin America tell us about modernity and cross-cultural connections
In 2017, under the new leadership of the 32-year old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia announced its plans to build the world’s most advanced smart city in the desert with great fanfar
Media, communication and the struggle for social progress
This article discusses the role of media and communications in contributing to social progress, as elaborated in a landmark international project – the International Panel on Social Progress. First, it analyses how media and digital platforms have contributed to global inequality by examining media access and infrastructure across world regions. Second, it looks at media governance and the different mechanisms of corporatized control over media p…
Global Media Studies: A Critical Agenda
At a time of severe political, economic, environmental, security, technological, and identitarian challenges, global media studies can make important contributions to an improved understanding of our current situation. A critical agenda for global media studies calls on the field to continue the tradition of speaking truth to power, drawing on a rich heritage of critical theories and approaches. But political, economic and other challenges to lif…
Creative Insurgency and the Celebrity President: Politics and Popular Culture from the Arab Spring to the White House
On Tuesday, December 6, 2016, a strange sight appeared on Rabin Square in Tel Aviv. Close to city hall, passersby saw a four-meter high gilded statue of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a suit, legs firmly planted on a long white plinth, hands hanging by his body. Some onlookers snapped selfies, others took old-fashioned pictures; at least one bowed mischievously to the imposing effigy of the country’s longest serving prime minister. Debates…
Book EXCERPT | Creative Insurgency in The Naked Blogger of Cairo
In the wake of the Arab uprisings, journalists, activists, and scholars coupled creative with revolution (or dissent, protest, resistance) to describe political graffiti, rap, art, and video. Distinguished institutions, from the Prince Claus Fund of the Netherlands to the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, lend the concept gravitas. The notion of “creative revolution” has a nice resonance. It is hard to think of a negative meani…
The Enigma of the Arab Uprisings
Did the same pro-market economic policies that gave rise to the Arab Spring also doom the would-be revolutionaries by sapping their capacity for envisioning radical alternatives
The revolutionary public sphere: The case of the Arab uprisings
The popular rebellions that swept Arab countries starting with Tunisia in December 2010 spawned an active sphere of dissenting cultural production. Although media harnessed by revolutionaries include public space, graffiti, street art, puppet shows, poetry, songs, cartoons, digital art, and music videos, many analyses have focused on social media as digital platforms. Social media and mobile telephones introduced a new element to political activi…
Terror, Territoriality, Temporality: Hypermedia Events in the Age of Islamic State
Considering the group that calls itself Islamic State (IS) as a “war machine,” an ever-shifting combination of humans and technology, this article articulates, from a Deleuzian perspective, terror, territoriality, and temporality as constitutive of events. It explores terrorism as a hypermedia event that resists conceptual containment in Dayan and Katz’s three categories of “contest,” “conquest,” or “coronation.” It builds on work that recognizes…
The projectilic image: Islamic State’s digital visual warfare and global networked affect
Islamic State’s (IS) image-warfare presents an auspicious opportunity to grasp the growing role of digital images in emerging configurations of global conflict. To understand IS’ image-warfare, this article explores the central role of digital images in the group’s war spectacle and identifies a key modality of this new kind of warfare: global networked affect. To this end, the analysis focuses on three primary sources: two Arabic-language IS boo…
American Studies Encounters the Middle East
The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World
"Uprisings spread like wildfire across the Arab world from 2010 to 2012, fueled by a desire for popular sovereignty. In Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere, protesters flooded the streets and the media, voicing dissent through slogans, graffiti, puppetry, videos, and satire that called for the overthrow of dictators and the regimes that sustained them. Investigating what drives people to risk everything to express themselves in rebellious art, "…
Trashing the sectarian system? Lebanon’s “You Stink” movement and the making of affective publics
During the summer of 2015, a garbage management crisis emerged in Beirut after Lebanon’s main landfill was shut down without finding an alternative, and piles of trash grew bigger on the streets, triggering a wave of contentious politics. An activist movement emerged early during the ongoing crisis: called “You Stink,” the movement is led by seasoned activists who display the usual social media savvy and artful protest tactics that echo activism …
Hybridity in Cultural Globalization
Hybridity has become a master trope across many spheres of cultural research, theory, and criticism, and one of the most widely used and criticized concepts in postcolonial theory. This article begins with a thorough review of the interdisciplinary scholarship on hybridity. Then it revisits the trope of hybridity in the context of a series of articles on cultural globalization published in the Washington Post in 1998. This series on "American Pop…
The global, the local, and the hybrid: A native ethnography of glocalization
International communication processes have been alternately understood as part of an overriding world process of globalization, or in terms of a polarity, between local audiences and global media, whose terms are disputed by the cultural imperialism and active audience formations. Departing from an interdisciplinary literature coalescing on cultural hybridity, I argue that hybridity is a pervasive but evasive cultural condition. I then theorize a…
Shifting Geertz: Toward a Theory of Translocalism in Global Communication Studies
Journal Article Shifting Geertz: Toward a Theory of Translocalism in Global Communication Studies Get access Marwan M. Kraidy, Marwan M. Kraidy 1Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6220 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Patrick D. Murphy Patrick D. Murphy 2Department of Mass Communications, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL 62026-1775 Search for…
Neo-Ottoman Cool: Turkish Popular Culture in the Arab Public Sphere
In the past decade, Turkish television drama has enjoyed popular success in the Arab world, fueling wide-ranging controversies in the pan-Arab public sphere. Such popularity is at first sight puzzling. After all, Arabs lived under Ottoman rule for 400 years, and for most of the 20th century Turkey's foreign policy neglected Arab interests. Why, then, would Turkish drama be popular with Arab audiences, especially at a time of unprecedented vibranc…
The projectilic image: Islamic State’s digital visual warfare and global networked affect
Islamic State’s (IS) image-warfare presents an auspicious opportunity to grasp the growing role of digital images in emerging configurations of global conflict. To understand IS’ image-warfare, this article explores the central role of digital images in the group’s war spectacle and identifies a key modality of this new kind of warfare: global networked affect. To this end, the analysis focuses on three primary sources: two Arabic-language IS boo…
Global media studies: Ethnographic perspectives
Part 1: Introduction, Chapter 1 Towards an Ethnographic Approach to Global Media Studies, Part 2: Situating Ethnography in Global Media Studies, Chapter 2 The Problem of Textuality in Ethnographic Audience Research, Chapter 3 Passing Ethnographies: Rethinking the Sites of Agency and Reflexivity in a Mediated World, Chapter 4 Where is Audience Ethnographer's Fieldwork?, Chapter 5 Audience letters and letter-writers: Constituting the Audience for R…
Trashing the sectarian system? Lebanon’s “You Stink” movement and the making of affective publics
During the summer of 2015, a garbage management crisis emerged in Beirut after Lebanon’s main landfill was shut down without finding an alternative, and piles of trash grew bigger on the streets, triggering a wave of contentious politics. An activist movement emerged early during the ongoing crisis: called “You Stink,” the movement is led by seasoned activists who display the usual social media savvy and artful protest tactics that echo activism …
Watching Turkish television dramas in Argentina: Entangled Proximities and Resigned Agency in Global Media Flows
For decades, the theory of cultural proximity, which states that audiences prefer culturally proximal content (Straubhaar, 1991), has remained a major framework to explain audience preferences. We show how transnational media flows have challenged its contemporary applicability. To probe this, we focus on a recent, intriguing, and still understudied development: the success of Turkish television dramas (dizi) in Latin America, the land where the …
Global Media Studies: A Critical Agenda
At a time of severe political, economic, environmental, security, technological, and identitarian challenges, global media studies can make important contributions to an improved understanding of our current situation. A critical agenda for global media studies calls on the field to continue the tradition of speaking truth to power, drawing on a rich heritage of critical theories and approaches. But political, economic and other challenges to lif…
The Revolutionary Body Politic: Preliminary Thoughts on a Neglected Medium in the Arab Uprisings
When Aliaa al-Mahdy, a 20-year old student in communication at the American University in Cairo, posted nude photographs of herself on a blog she called “A Rebel’s Diary,” she unleashed one of the most heated polemics to come out of the Egyptian revolution that began on January 25, 2011 and deposed Hosni Mubarak less than one month later. This essay, written in the days after the scandal broke in November 2011, raises preliminary questions about …
Transnational Advertising and International Relations: US Press Discourses on the Benetton ‘We on Death Row’ Campaign
This article analyzes Benetton’s 2000 ‘We on Death Row’ advertising campaign as a site of cultural production where ideological differences on capital punishment between the United States and Europe are played out. We examine the massmediated public discourse framing the campaign in the US prestige press. More specifically, we conduct a textual analysis of news stories and editorials about the campaign in the Washington Post, New York Times, Los …
The Production of Modernization: Daniel Lerner, Mass Media, and the Passing of Traditional Society
Media, communication and the struggle for social progress
This article discusses the role of media and communications in contributing to social progress, as elaborated in a landmark international project – the International Panel on Social Progress. First, it analyses how media and digital platforms have contributed to global inequality by examining media access and infrastructure across world regions. Second, it looks at media governance and the different mechanisms of corporatized control over media p…
The revolutionary public sphere: The case of the Arab uprisings
The popular rebellions that swept Arab countries starting with Tunisia in December 2010 spawned an active sphere of dissenting cultural production. Although media harnessed by revolutionaries include public space, graffiti, street art, puppet shows, poetry, songs, cartoons, digital art, and music videos, many analyses have focused on social media as digital platforms. Social media and mobile telephones introduced a new element to political activi…
Terror, Territoriality, Temporality: Hypermedia Events in the Age of Islamic State
Considering the group that calls itself Islamic State (IS) as a “war machine,” an ever-shifting combination of humans and technology, this article articulates, from a Deleuzian perspective, terror, territoriality, and temporality as constitutive of events. It explores terrorism as a hypermedia event that resists conceptual containment in Dayan and Katz’s three categories of “contest,” “conquest,” or “coronation.” It builds on work that recognizes…
The Body As Medium in the Digital Age: Challenges and Opportunities
This essay glosses an attempt to capture communication in the Arab uprisings through the prism of the human body. Such an approach to communication and revolution entails several challenges and opportunities. Challenges include tension between biopolitical approaches and a perspective that considers the body as an instrument of practice, the tendency in scholarship that restricts discussions of the body to discussions of gender and sexuality, and…
Contention and Circulation in the Digital Middle East: Music Video As Catalyst
This article explores music video as a catalyst of public discourse in the digital age through an analysis of heated online controversies fueled by Wa‘d ‘Arqoub ( WA), a video featuring a romantic relationship against the backdrop of the plight of Iraq under U.S. occupation. It puts forth the argument that music videos stimulate public discourse because of their capacity to (1) promote ideas and make them visible, (2) conjure up several meanings …
Northwestern University in Qatar: A Distinctive Global University
Founded in 2008 through a partnership between Northwestern University and Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development (QF), Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q) educates creative, ethical, and impactful communicators, and contributes both to Northwestern's excellence and the rise of Qatar as a knowledge-based society. NU-Q's vision is multidisciplinary, multimodal, multilingual, and focused on the Global South as an intel…
The Politics of Revolutionary Celebrity in the Contemporary Arab World
This essay grapples with Arab celebrity as an overtly political, inherently transnational phenomenon and explores how revolutionary celebrity may expand our understanding of celebrity writ large. Through the prism of a media battle between the singer Assala and the Assad regime in the Syrian uprising since March 2011, a politics of celebrity is explored that pits the body of the star against the body of the sovereign, at the nexus of revolution, …
Neo-anachronism? The coiled temporalities of South-South media flows
This article mobilizes Jesus Martín Barbero’s magnum opus, Communication, Culture, and Hegemony, towards a better understanding of the contemporary global success of Turkish television drama, known as dizi, in Latin America, the land of the once-mighty telenovela. Hilighting Martín-Barbero’s centrality to my own intellectual project on the transnational connection and transcultural resonances between the Middle East and Latin America, I draw on p…
Boycotting Neo-Ottoman Cool: Geopolitics and Media Industries in the Egypt-Turkey Row over Television Drama
In the 2000s, Turkish-Arab relations warmed up, and the rising popularity of Turkish television dramas in the Arab world was part of an overall ‘zero-problem with neighbors’ realignment initiated by Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development party ( AKP ). However, Turkey’s involvement in the Arab uprisings complicated this rapprochement. The Turkish government, given their doctrinal proximity, supported the Muslim Brotherhood governments that were …
Reality TV and Multiple Arab Modernities: A Theoretical Exploration
Intertextual Maneuvers Around the Subaltern: Aladdin as a Postmodern Text
The global, the local, and the hybrid: A native ethnography of glocalization
International communication processes have been alternately understood as part of an overriding world process of globalization, or in terms of a polarity, between local audiences and global media, whose terms are disputed by the cultural imperialism and active audience formations. Departing from an interdisciplinary literature coalescing on cultural hybridity, I argue that hybridity is a pervasive but evasive cultural condition. I then theorize a…
Ferment in Global Media Studies
Hybridity in Cultural Globalization
Hybridity has become a master trope across many spheres of cultural research, theory, and criticism, and one of the most widely used and criticized concepts in postcolonial theory. This article begins with a thorough review of the interdisciplinary scholarship on hybridity. Then it revisits the trope of hybridity in the context of a series of articles on cultural globalization published in the Washington Post in 1998. This series on "American Pop…
Transnational advertising and international relations: US press discourses on the Benetton 'We on Death Row' campaign
Transnational Advertising and International Relations: US Press Discourses on the Benetton ‘We on Death Row’ Campaign
This article analyzes Benetton’s 2000 ‘We on Death Row’ advertising campaign as a site of cultural production where ideological differences on capital punishment between the United States and Europe are played out. We examine the massmediated public discourse framing the campaign in the US prestige press. More specifically, we conduct a textual analysis of news stories and editorials about the campaign in the Washington Post, New York Times, Los …
Global media studies: Ethnographic perspectives
Part 1: Introduction, Chapter 1 Towards an Ethnographic Approach to Global Media Studies, Part 2: Situating Ethnography in Global Media Studies, Chapter 2 The Problem of Textuality in Ethnographic Audience Research, Chapter 3 Passing Ethnographies: Rethinking the Sites of Agency and Reflexivity in a Mediated World, Chapter 4 Where is Audience Ethnographer's Fieldwork?, Chapter 5 Audience letters and letter-writers: Constituting the Audience for R…
Media and the Path to Peace
Media and the Path to Peace. By Gadi Wolfsfeld. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 284p. $70.00 cloth, $26.99 paper. While the role of the mass media during conflict and war has been the subject of numerous studies in the field of mass communications, there is a paucity of research on mass media during peace processes. Media and the Path to Peace is an important step in remedying this lack. A study such as this confronts an unfortunate r…
Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization
The intermingling of people and media from different cultures is a communication-based phenomenon known as hybridity. Drawing on original research from Lebanon to Mexico and analyzing the use of the term in cultural and postcolonial studies (as well as the popular and business media), Marwan Kraidy offers readers a history of the idea and a set of prescriptions for its future use. Kraidy analyzes the use of the concept of cultural mixture from th…
Hypermedia and governance in Saudi Arabia
The advent of new media has altered the information dynamics that shape public discourse. Convergence, miniaturization, personalization, interactivity, and mobility have blurred the boundaries between producers, consumers, and regulators of information. The role and impact of old mass media such as radio, television and the press, has changed as a result of their interaction with electronic mail, cellular phones, digital cameras, among others. Th…
Reality TV and Multiple Arab Modernities: A Theoretical Exploration
My (Global) Media Studies
What we commonly refer to as “global media studies” or “global communication studies” still struggles to live up to its name. Mercifully, the field appears to have exited the suffocating paradigmatic monoliths of the past, opening up space for theoretical and methodological experimentation and for studies grounded in a geosocial locus but without predetermined outcomes. At the same time, the field is painstakingly coming to terms (to speak optimi…
Star Academy as Arab Political Satire
The previous excerpt is taken from a column by Syrian journalist Hakam al-Baba, published in the London-based Pan-Arab newspaper al-Quds al-ʿArabi . Al-Baba, a middle-aged Syrian journalist known for his biting sarcasm, has written some of the most perceptive critiques of Syrian and Arab media, including a famous 2005 article in the Syrian daily Tishreen , in which he relates his experience of harassment by the mukhābarāt . In the excerpted colum…
Shifting Geertz: Toward a Theory of Translocalism in Global Communication Studies
Journal Article Shifting Geertz: Toward a Theory of Translocalism in Global Communication Studies Get access Marwan M. Kraidy, Marwan M. Kraidy 1Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6220 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Patrick D. Murphy Patrick D. Murphy 2Department of Mass Communications, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL 62026-1775 Search for…
Reality Television, Gender, and Authenticity in Saudi Arabia
Drawn from a bigger project (Kraidy, 2009, in press), this article examines the heated debate triggered by the pan-Arab reality show Star Academy in Saudi Arabia. It examines how controversies over authenticity spawned by popular culture crystallize broader social and political struggles. The article focuses on Star Academy as a contentious media event, describing and analyzing various Saudi reactions to Star Academy, and zeroing in on what the c…
Reality Television and Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life
What does it mean to be modern outside the West? Based on a wealth of primary data collected over five years, Reality Television and Arab Politics analyzes how reality television stirred an explosive mix of religion, politics, and sexuality, fuelling heated polemics over cultural authenticity, gender relations, and political participation in the Arab world. The controversies, Kraidy argues, are best understood as a social laboratory in which acto…
Arab Television Industries
The politics of reality television: Global Perspectives
Chapter 1. Introduction: Migrating Genres, Travelling Participants, Shifting Theories Katherine Sender PART 1: PRODUCING IDENTITY Introduction Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt Chapter 2. Real-izing Exploitation Mark Andrejevic Chapter 3. When Reality TV is a Job Francois Jost Chapter 4. Just Be Yourself - Only More So: Ordinary Celebrity in the Era of Self-Service Television Laura Grindstaff PART 2: LABORING THE SELF Introduction Adrienne Shaw Chapter 5…
The Rise of Transnational Media Systems: Implications of Pan-Arab Media for Comparative Research
The nation-state as unit of analysis underpins the three models of media and politics Hallin and Mancini develop in Comparing Media Systems (2004b). Although they “take the nation-state as [our] primary unit of analysis...and media systems have to a large extent been organized at this level over the past couple of centuries,” the authors recognize that “it is important to keep in mind that this in some ways misleading” (Hallin and Mancini, 2004b:…
Communication and Power in the Global Era: Orders and Borders
"This book re-visits how we think about communication and power in the global era. It takes stock of the last fifty years of scholarship, maps key patterns and concepts and sets an agenda for theory and research. The book addresses such questions as:How are national and cultural identities re-fashioned and expressed in the global era?How can we best understand the emergence of multiple and sometimes antagonistic modernities worldwide?How are poli…
The Revolutionary Body Politic: Preliminary Thoughts on a Neglected Medium in the Arab Uprisings
When Aliaa al-Mahdy, a 20-year old student in communication at the American University in Cairo, posted nude photographs of herself on a blog she called “A Rebel’s Diary,” she unleashed one of the most heated polemics to come out of the Egyptian revolution that began on January 25, 2011 and deposed Hosni Mubarak less than one month later. This essay, written in the days after the scandal broke in November 2011, raises preliminary questions about …
Contention and Circulation in the Digital Middle East: Music Video As Catalyst
This article explores music video as a catalyst of public discourse in the digital age through an analysis of heated online controversies fueled by Wa‘d ‘Arqoub ( WA), a video featuring a romantic relationship against the backdrop of the plight of Iraq under U.S. occupation. It puts forth the argument that music videos stimulate public discourse because of their capacity to (1) promote ideas and make them visible, (2) conjure up several meanings …
Les médias en Arabie saoudite: Luttes politiques et controverses sociales, de Star Academy au Printemps arabe
Nulle part dans le monde arabe les inquiétudes au sujet du changement social et culturel n'ont été aussi passionnément discutées qu'en Arabie saoudite, où la doctrine salafiste du wahhabisme est au coeur du système, en tant que conception sacro sainte de l'authenticité enracinée dans la pureté culturelle et religieuse et la séparation entre hommes et femmes. L'avènement de la « téléréalité » au milieu des années 2000 a réactivé ces débats dans le…
Neo-Ottoman Cool: Turkish Popular Culture in the Arab Public Sphere
In the past decade, Turkish television drama has enjoyed popular success in the Arab world, fueling wide-ranging controversies in the pan-Arab public sphere. Such popularity is at first sight puzzling. After all, Arabs lived under Ottoman rule for 400 years, and for most of the 20th century Turkey's foreign policy neglected Arab interests. Why, then, would Turkish drama be popular with Arab audiences, especially at a time of unprecedented vibranc…
The Body As Medium in the Digital Age: Challenges and Opportunities
This essay glosses an attempt to capture communication in the Arab uprisings through the prism of the human body. Such an approach to communication and revolution entails several challenges and opportunities. Challenges include tension between biopolitical approaches and a perspective that considers the body as an instrument of practice, the tendency in scholarship that restricts discussions of the body to discussions of gender and sexuality, and…
Political science (41 works) · Sociology (37 works) · Law (33 works) · Media studies (31 works) · Law (21 works) · Politics (21 works) · History (14 works) · Media Studies and Communication (14 works) · Middle East Politics and Society (14 works) · Art (12 works)