CARGC & C3 Book Talk: Joe F. Khalil, Northwestern Qatar, and Bilge Yesil, CUNY

“Global Communication and Area Studies: Insights from the Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East”

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About the Event

This talk explores recent research on media and culture in the Middle East, offering fresh perspectives into the debates of the twenty-first century. Based on the Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East, the speakers will dissect complexities of global communication research through the lens of the Middle East, challenging monolithic perceptions and revealing the region’s rich diversity. They will underscore the growing significance of the Middle East in interdisciplinary studies and assess the relevance of area studies to the field of global communication. By capturing the political economic and socio-cultural dynamics that shape media and culture in the Middle East, this discussion promises to enrich our understanding of this vital region in the context of global communication.

About the Speakers

Joe F. Khalil is Associate Professor in Residence at Northwestern University in Qatar and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication at George Washington University. His publications include Arab Television Industries; Culture, Time, and Publics in the Arab World; the Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East, and the forthcoming The Digital Double Bind.

Bilge Yesil is Associate Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island and Doctoral Faculty of Middle East Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Video Surveillance: Power and Privacy in Everyday Life, Media in New Turkey: The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State, and the forthcoming Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order.

Respondent

Wazhmah Osman is an Afghan-American filmmaker and Associate Professor in the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. In her book Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists (University of Illinois Press, 2020), she analyzes the impact of international funding and cross-border media flows on the culture and politics of Afghanistan, the region, and beyond. She is also the co-director of Postcards from Tora Bora (Documentary Educational Resources, 2007) and the co-author of the forthcoming Afghanistan: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University, forthcoming). Osman has appeared as a commentator on Democracy Now, NPR, and Al Jazeera and works with community and activist groups. She is a joint visiting scholar with the Center for Media at Risk and the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication for the 2023-24 academic year.

This event is a part of the “Identity at the Limits of Representation” series co-sponsored by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) and the Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication (Annenberg C3).