Media Evolution on the Eve of the Arab Spring

Leading scholars of Arab media come together to offer unparalleled insight into the communication environment that preceded the political and societal ruptures that shook the Arab world 2010-2011. Examining the role of competing publics, the state's ability to construct meaning, and social and political change in the region, they unsettle oversimplifications of much of the existing literature and examine numerous precipitating conditions, including, political stagnation, civil engagement, new media, rural and urban divides, Islamist blogospheres, video games, Turkish and Syrian dramas, mediated diplomacy, and diaspora.

Leila Hudson is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Associate Director of the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona, USA. An anthropologist and historian, she researches and teaches on popular culture, conflict, gender and political economy in the Arab world. She is the author of Transforming Damascus: Space and Modernity in an Islamic City (2008) and publishes in Middle East Policy and the Journal of Islamic Studies. She directs the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflicts (sismec.org) and the Arizona Arabic Flagship Program.
 
Adel Iskandar is Assistant Professor of Global Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. His research focuses on media, identity, and politics, and he has lectured extensively on these topics worldwide. Before starting at Simon Fraser University, he taught at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Communication, Culture, and Technology program at Georgetown University, USA. He is the author of Egypt In Flux: Essays on an Unfinished Revolution (2013) and co-author of Al-Jazeera: The Story of the Network that is Rattling Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism.

Mimi Kirk is Research Director at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., USA. She is co-editor of Palestine and the Palestinians in the Twenty-first Century (2013 with Rochelle Davis) and Modern Middle East Authoritarianism: Roots, Ramifications, and Crisis (2013 with Noureddine Jebnoun and Mehrdad Kia). Her writing has appeared in Middle East Report, Jadaliyya, and the Atlantic.

Publics, Imaginaries, Soft Power, and Epistemologies on the Eve of the Arab Uprisings; Leila Hudson and Adel Iskandar
SOCIAL CHANGE AND POLITICAL CULTURE
1. Arab Media, Political Stagnation, and Civil Engagement: Reflections on the Eve of the Arab Spring; Mohamed Zayani
2. New Media, Social Change, and the Communication Revolution in an Egyptian Village; Sahar Khamis
3. Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture, and Dissent; Bruce Etling, John Kelly, Robert Faris, and John Palfrey
4. From Brotherhood to Blogosphere: Dynamics of Cyberactivism and Identity in the Egyptian Ikhwan; Courtney Radsch
NEW GENRES AND LITERACIES
5. Preaching Islam to the Video Game Generation: New Media Literacies and Religious Edutainment in the Arab World; Vit Sisler
6. Neopatriarchy in Syrian and Turkish Television Drama: Between the Culture Industry and the Dialect Imagination; Leila Hudson
7. Media Fatwas and Fatwa Editors: Challenging and Preserving Yusuf al-Qaradawi's Religious Authority; Bettina Gräf
8. Technology Literacies of the New Media: Phrasing the World in the 'Arab Easy' (R)evolution; Yves Gonzalez-Quijano
GLOBAL EFFECTS
9. BBC Broadcasting in the Middle East: The Evolution of Public Diplomacy; Annabelle Sreberny
10. New Media and Public Diplomacy in the New Arab World; Philip Seib
11. Al Jazeera English as a Conciliatory Medium; Mohammed el-Nawawy and Shawn Powers
12. Imagined Coherence: Transnational Media and the Arab Diaspora in Europe; Khalil Rinnawi
EVOLUTION OF MEDIA THEORIES
13. The State of Arab Journalism Studies; Noha Mellor
14. Arab and Western Media Systems Typologies; Kai Hafez
15. Defying Definition: Toward Reflexivity in 'Arab Media' Studies; Adel Iskandar