*CFP* "MEDIA BUILDING: ARCHITECTURE, COMMUNICATIONS AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT", VIRTUAL CONFERENCE

Media Building: Architecture, Communications and the Built Environment

Virtual Conference, 7-10 July 2021

Hosted by the University of Salford and Northumbria University

 

Since the emergence of the first newspapers, the relationship between place and content has been central to the media’s development. The spatial politics of media production could fundamentally shape its reception and circulation. If ‘the medium is the message’, then this applied equally to where media artefacts were created as to what was contained within them. Publishers quickly understood that, from both a commercial and philosophical perspective, landmark headquarters or publishing plants could help enforce the legitimacy and significance of their enterprises. Thus, structures such as the striking neo-gothic spires of the Chicago Tribune tower or the sleek art-deco exteriors of the Daily Express building in London offered compelling expressions of media power, modernity, and the aesthetics of mass communication, providing what Aurora Wallace describes as a “definable shape…a hook on which to hang some news about the media itself.” At the same time, media buildings became key nodes in the urban geography of communications, complementing editorial efforts to make and remake the modern metropolis.

*CFP* "THE ARABIC PRESS PUBLISHED OUTSIDE THE ARAB WORLD: CONTEXT EFFECTS ON AN ALLOPHONE PRESS", SPECIAL AUTUMN/WINTER 2021 ISSUE, REVUE DES MONDES MUSULMANS ET DE LA MÉDITERRANEÉ

This call for papers concerns the Arabic press published outside the Arab world. It includes all periodical publications (daily newspapers and reviews) published in Arabic in countries where this language is not one of the dominant languages.

For the needs of this call for papers, we will use the expression « the Arabic press ». However, this press is not a homogeneous entity. It is, in fact, heterogenous and displays multiple contents arising in multiple temporalities and contexts, but also the result of the various paths followed by its instigators (Arabs or Arabists), their motivations, as well as the evolving status of the Arabic language. This diversity is also linked to the different locations of this press and the relationships that these contexts maintain with both the Arab area and the Arab diasporic communities. Thus, the central elements of our thinking reflect the interactions that this Allophone press maintains with the social, political and cultural configurations in which it operates.

Very little research has been devoted to this press in France and elsewhere. In general, the works that examine this research object are case studies that focus on one or another specific publication. Most of the in-depth work concerns the content of specific titles and fails to take into consideration the general mapping of this type of publication.

*CFP* "POLITICAL COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA PRACTICES IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA", EDITED COLLECTION

I.B.Tauris is seeking book proposals for a new academic book series: Political Communication and Media Practices in the Middle East and North Africa.

The popular uprisings that rocked several Arab countries at the beginning of 2011, and the more recent ones in Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon and Iraq, arose, among other things, in the context of changing media practices and political communication in the region. Beyond the actions by political elites and institutions, several of these movements were characterised by grassroots communication on social media, and many included creative practises by a diverse range of actors.

Books in this seriescritically engage with the complex and fluid relationship between politics, communication and culture in the Middle East and North Africa, taking into account the specificities of social and political local contexts, diverse political and media systems, media institutions, media and political actors and populations as well as differentiations along religious, sectarian, ethnic, gendered and racial lines. Topics and themes include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

*CFP* "DISINFORMATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST", SPECIAL ISSUE, OPEN INFORMATION SCIENCE JOURNAL

De Gruyter’s Open Information Science journal has a call for papers for a special issue on disinformation in the Middle East.

Similar to other regions around the world, the Middle East has witnessed the widespread of misinformation in relation to different issues like politics, health, and armed conflicts. This is, indeed, not a recent phenomenon as the region has been plagued by infodemics for many decades. For example, disinformation campaigns were used by the US and other countries to assist in the wars on Iraq in 1990 and 2003. Also, the Syrian conflict provides ample evidence on the use of disinformation around attacks targeting innocent civilians to further the strategic interests of the Russian and Syrian governments. Recent reports and data releases by Facebook and Twitter show that there are several systematic and coordinated activities that occur in the Middle East in order to support regional players like Saudi Arabia and the UAE in enhancing their political influence in the region. There is a need to study infodemics in some specific geographical contexts like the Middle East due to the evolving nature of this phenomenon, and this special issue is focused on the examination of recent case studies involving the spread of misinformation and disinformation. We welcome studies that are focused on the empirical investigation of infodemics targeting the Middle East and/or originating from the region.

*CFP* "FROM BBC ARABIC TO AL JAZEERA ENGLISH: THE MIDDLE EAST IN THE AGE OF GLOBALISED AND GLOBALISING NARRATIVES", SPECIAL ISSUE, UNIVERSITÉ DE LILLE JOURNAL

Traditionally, discussions of the Middle East and Mass Media largely focus on the following topics: the lack of fully independent media in the Middle East, or the lack of objectivity by Western media networks in their representations of the Middle East. Studies demonstrate the ways in which the states in the Middle East tend to establish discouraging barriers in order to impede the development of an institutionalized, free and participatory media in the Arab world (Telhami 2013 and Alterman 1998). This remark of course can be easily extended to Iran and, more recently, Turkey as the latter’s leader is increasingly criticized for imprisoning journalists in the post-coup purges. 

Yet, as other studies demonstrate, the advent of satellite TV, and later the Internet, has seriously challenged the strict state monopoly. Increasing Arab and Persian channels broadcast globally and have enabled growing numbers of Middle Easterners to access information sources outside their state- controlled borders. These outlets are run either by diasporas (often funded by regional rivals of the home country) and opposition exiles, or belong to established media networks, such as the BBC, CNN, or Russia Today which often reflect and justify foreign policy decisions by incumbent administrations. In this sense, some have claimed, for instance, that it is Britain’s historical “colonial” interest in the region that justifies the BBC Arabic and Persian’s hefty budget despite the corporation’s continued financial struggle under constant Tory austerity.

*CFP* CALL FOR ARTICLES, SPECIAL ISSUE, THE CYBER ORIENT JOURNAL

CyberOrient is devoted to research on the impact of cyberspace and its representation on the Middle East, North Africa and wider Islamic world in Asia. Our last special issue provides a critical insight into digital layers of revolutions, digital communication, and dissidence in the Middle Eastern and North African region.

We are a peer-reviewed journal with two issues per year and we invite scholars in any field to contribute articles or serve as guest editors. With a rapid turn-around time, CyberOrient can publish online in a timely fashion.


What to Submit

Submissions are welcome from scholars in any discipline. Text style follows the current edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. For further information, consult the Publishing Style Guide of the American Anthropological Association.

*CFP* “CINEMA AND MEDIA CULTURES IN THE MIDDLE EAST”, CHAPTER BOOK

Book proposals are sought for publication in a new book series, Cinema and Media Cultures in the Middle East, the purpose of which is to demarcate and critically examine the shifting terrain of film- and media-making in the Middle East, and of practices of film and media studies regarding it, testing them both against their larger, social enabling conditions at the national, regional, and transnational levels.

Titles in the series will engage recent developments in the field of Middle East film and media studies and will help point the field in an intellectually meaningful, pedagogically effective direction in relation to both current and, in some cases, significant, previously ignored, older work.

The proposed series is conceived at a moment during which Middle Eastern film and film criticism have begun to develop in new directions. Recent years have witnessed a modest increase in scholarly engagement with topics and modes of inquiry often previously considered outside academic discourse.  

*CFP* “COVERING SYRIA-POLITICS AND COMMUNICATION IN TIMES OF WAR AND REVOLUTION”, SOAS WORKSHOP

Covering Syria. Politics and Communication in Times of War and Revolution

25 de Febrero de 2020

SOAS, University of London

This workshop aims at bringing together academics and postgraduate researchers working on Syria, media and political communication. We are particularly interested in the following questions:

• How Syrian opposition media are rethinking their strategies for covering a country that is still fragmented and occupied but mostly dominated by the Assad regime? How Syrian journalists and cultural activists continue to document the conflict in exile? How gender relations were impacted by this new media environment?
• Which forms of archival work is possible to preserve the memory of past engagements?
• How did international media organisations document the conflict and what narratives did they disseminate? What does a context of post-truth and the increasing circulation of fake news mean for Syrian and international media actors?
• How have the Syrian regime and its allies been communicating since their self-declared victory over opposition forces?

*CFP* "THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: ORIENTALISM, REVERSE ORIENTALISM AND BEYOND IN LITERATURE AND FILM", EDITED COLLECTION

The influence of Edward Said’s Orientalism over the last four decades, both in its specific theoretical applications to Asia and the Middle-East, and in its more nebulous uses across a range of disciplines and interdisciplinary fields in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, has been well documented and closely debated. Said’s central proposition—reinforced in subsequent commentaries such as The World, the Text and the Critic (1983) and Culture and Imperialism (1993)—that Occidental spheres of influence and imperialist policies produced not only physical colonisation but a construction of an imaginary “East” which robbed Asia of its agency in terms of self-representation is, though refuted by some, generally acknowledged across a number of academic disciplines. Whether one accepts this creed or is opposed to it there is little argument that, for better or worse, it invariably frames and at times overwhelms theoretical analysis of East-West interaction. Subsequent analysis of Western fictional texts located in Asia or representing aspects of Asia, and Asian texts either responding to Western canonical works and Western representations of Asia, or representing Western culture(s), has invariably been dominated by this binary of East-West power dynamics. Yet, while noting that these perspectives have (arguably) served as a useful ideological starting point in many such discussions, more recent processes of globalisation, transnationalism, and multimedia may render such binary polarities as superfluous.

*CFP* “RESISTANCE AND ACTIVISM”, INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON MEDIA & THE MIDDLE EAST 2020

Resistance and Activism

International Symposium on Media & The Middle East

6-7 de Marzo de 2020

University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

University of East Anglia invites proposals for An International Symposium on Media and the Middle East. The symposium aims to bring together scholars, and filmmakers from around the world interested in exploring ideas of Resistance and Activism in the Middle East in relation to a range of media including film, television, radio, video, and digital media. Papers may be historical or contemporary in scope.

The event will begin with a film screening of For Sama (Waad Al-Kateab, 2019) at Cinema City Norwich on Friday March 6, 2020. A symposium filled with panel discussions, short film screenings and a keynote by Dr Saeed Talajooy (University of St Andrews) will follow the next day on Saturday March 7, 2020. 

*CFP* “AFFECT AND VIOLENCE: GENDERING THE MIDDLE EAST”, WORKSHOP, UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI

Affect and Violence: Gendering the Middle East

Gender Studies 2019 Conference: On Violence

24-26 October

University of Helsinki

For any queries, please don’t hesitate to contact s.tafakori@lse.ac.uk and/or sa130@soas.ac.uk.

Affect and Violence: Gendering the Middle East:

The aim of the proposed workshop is to explore the role of emotions and affect in (re)presenting, normalizing and shaping the contours of gender and violence in reference to the Middle East and North Africa in particular and the global south more broadly. There has been a good deal of scholarly attention in recent years to affects around conflict, disaster, vulnerability and trauma, but largely in relation to Euro-American perspectives and theorisations. 

This workshop aims instead to engage with the ways in which emotional framings of violence and gender in the MENA region are shaped by the co-constitution of local and global, West and non-West, and the historical and the everyday within transnational contexts.  We encourage submissions which examine in what ways the geopolitics of nationalism, (in)security, conflict and crisis in the region reinforce or complicate gendered and racialised discourses, and how the tasks of solidarity are rendered more complex and layered as a result.  These concerns may be shaped by attention to the broader context of the role of epistemic violence in constructions of the region, in the biopolitics and necropolitics of managing the life and death of populations.