[ecrea] CFP: New Media and Political Change in the Middle East (AAA)

Call for Papers:

New Media and Political Change in the Middle East

American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings 2011
Montreal, Canada

Analysts of the recent revolutions in the Arab World are, at the time of this writing, still struggling to make sense of the role that new media have played in their unfolding.  Rehearsing longstanding debates about the relationship between media and social change, many have asked: did new media “cause” the revolutions?  Or would they have occurred in other ways were these technologies and platforms unavailable?  The reductive terms of this dichotomy have tended to obscure careful assessment of the ways that new media are altering everyday political life in the region.  Analysts must attend to the variable usage of technological tools and media platforms among different communities and constituents, and the divergent effects thereof.  In Egypt and elsewhere, for example, Facebook and Twitter are the media of choice among younger activists, while Al-Jazeera is an outlet that people across the region rely on to follow events and organize politically.  Often lost in the celebra
tion of what some have called “Revolution 2.0”, a narrative which tends to position new media as somehow predisposed to grassroots usage by social movements and disenfranchised populations, is the extent to which these tools are also being employed by hegemonic institutions in the region, no less repressive regimes.  Nor has there been adequate attention to the ways that old fashioned street politics – with their reliance on older media and technologies including handbills, graffiti, and what Mauss called the first technology, the body – remain integral to confronting police, soldiers, and irregular forces in support of the regimes.

This panel will use ethnography and other critical interdisciplinary methods to untangle the varying ways that new media, technology and politics are intertwined for a set diverse constituents and institutions in the Middle East, often with conflicting effects.  We invite papers that consider any of the following questions, or variants thereof:  how do hegemonic institutions, including institutions of state, employ these technological tools?  What are the micro-practices by which these tools are employed – on both ends of production and consumption – as a means of political mobilization at the popular level?  How does usage vary across different demographics?  What variables are at play when new media succeed in producing mass mobilization?  How does “real time,” whether that of the live feed or of social media consumption via mobile technologies, alter political equations?  What is the role of new media aesthetics in the political equation – particularly the emerging visual
 grammar of YouTube and/or video captured by cellular phones?  How do these aesthetics reframe or incorporate older media?  How might we historicize the interplay of politics and new media for different constituencies – chiefly, what difference does new media make in this political equation, when compared with usages of older media forms for political ends.  What, if anything, does the prominence of certain American media outlets say about technology, globalization, and power in the new Middle East?  How have recent events in the Middle East challenged hegemonic scholarly narratives within new media studies?  What are the ethics and practical challenges of studying new media in the Middle East during this time of profound change?  Please email Rebecca Stein at (rlstein /at/ duke.edu) and Amahl Bishara at (amahl.bishara /at/ tufts.edu) to submit an abstract by Thursday, March 31.



* * * * * * *
Amahl Bishara
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Tufts University
304 Eaton Hall
5 The Green
Medford MA 02155
617 627 4265
(amahl.bishara /at/ tufts.edu)



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