A vital resource for comprehending media and culture in the Middle East.
Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Global Handbooks in Media and Communication Research series, The Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East is essential reading for academics and researchers in the field and an excellent textbook for students of global studies, media and communication, journalism, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, and history.
Description
The Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East offers a fresh perspective on the region’s cultures and media, guiding readers through important questions and global transformations that shape the twenty-first century debates. This interdisciplinary volume, featuring contributions from established experts and new voices, explores the multi-local characteristics of knowledge production, media, and culture in the Middle East. By emphasizing the need for theoretically and historically grounded integrated analysis over universalism, the book contextualizes the region’s competing histories, geopolitical and socio-economic issues, and ongoing cultural and media debates.
Contemporary Case Studies
Presents rich analyses anchored in contemporary research and broad historical and geopolitical contexts
Abstracts
The first part highlights key issues in studying culture and media in the Middle East. Five essays explore the region's role as a laboratory for cultural, political, and economic experimentation. The contributors analyze Orientalism, modernity, hybridity, and cultural studies in the Middle Eastern context.
The second part explores political agency, gender roles, minority rights, and class struggles and how they differ across the region. Sections one and two provide frameworks, contributors offer entry points for empirical work on mainstream and alternative media as sociocultural, political, and economic sites.
Contributors in the third section analyze media configurations' development and significance. Chapters explore trans-regional connections of national media industries expanding globally, covering topics such as media policies, press, television, streaming, film, archives, and the digital Middle East.
In Part four, contributors investigate media and cultural links in regional contexts, analyzing ideologies, representations, formats, spectacles, laws, practices, film, TV, funding, advertising, and media content, revealing connections between media and everyday life in the Middle East.
Part five explores activist and self-expressive media practices, including independent online news, minority media, digital images, and street art, challenging state-controlled and market-driven traditional media.
In part six, contributors examine future directions in studying media and culture in the Middle East. They address pressing questions, challenges, emerging phenomena, and trends, offering pedagogical and research choices for further exploration.
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Authors
JOE F. KHALIL
Associate Professor of Global Media and Communication, Northwestern University, Qatar. He is the co-author of Arab Television Industries, co-editor of Culture, Time and Publics in the Arab World, and has authored numerous other scholarly articles and book chapters.
TOURYA GUAAYBESS
Professor, Research Centre on Mediations (CREM), University of Lorraine, France. She was a Marie Curie Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and Visiting Researching at the University of Oxford. She has published numerous books and articles on the political economy of media and journalism in the Arab world.
BILGE YESIL
Associate Professor of Media Culture, College of Staten Island; Doctoral Faculty of Middle Eastern Studies, The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research interest is in global communication and media. She is the author of Video Surveillance: Power and Privacy in Everyday Life and Media in New Turkey: The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State.
GHOLAM KHIABANY
Reader in Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. He is the author of Iranian Media: The Paradox of Modernity and co-author of Blogistan, and Media, Democracy and Social Change. He is also co-editor of Liberalism in Neoliberal Times: Dimensions, Contradictions, Limits; and After Charlie Hebdo: Terror, Racism and Free Speech.