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Publication Mediating Possibility after Suffering: Meaning Making of the Micro-political through Digital Media(2018-08-01) Rajabi, SamiraCARGC Paper 9, “Mediating Possibility after Suffering: Meaning Making of the Micro-political through Digital Media,” by CARGC Postdoctoral Fellow, Samira Rajabi, is based on Rajabi’s 2018 CARGC Colloquium. Using three empirical case studies from Instagram, Rajabi examines the Trump administration’s 2017 travel ban as a traumatic experience and its digital mediation. First exploring a general understanding of trauma as it relates to global media studies, she then develops the notion of “symbolic trauma” to understand how Iranian-Americans mediated the travel ban’s effects.Publication Vamping the Archive: Approaching Aesthetics in Global Media(2018-04-01) El Zein, RayyaCARGC Paper 8, “Vamping the Archive: Approaching Aesthetics in Global Media,” by CARGC Postdoctoral Fellow, Rayya El Zein, is based on El Zein’s CARGC Colloquium and draws its inspiration from Metro al-Madina's Hishik Bishik Show in Beirut. CARGC Paper 8 weaves assessments of local and regional contexts, aesthetic and performance theory, thick description, participant observation, and interview to develop an approach to aesthetics in cultural production from the vantage of global media studies that she calls “vamping the archive.”Publication In the Shadow of Official Ambition: National Media Policy Confronts Global Media Capital(2014-04-01) Curtin, MichaelCARGC Paper 1 drew on Curtin’s then book project, Media Capital, which compares and contrasts cities that have become centers of the global film and television industries, such as Bombay, Lagos, and Miami. In the paper, Curtin explored the implications of Chinese cultural policy within the broader context of media globalization, providing a framework for understanding the logics of media capital and the challenges confronting national governments, making comparisons to Arab, African, and Indian media, and reflecting on the prospects for creativity and diversity in film and television.Publication Making Real-Time Drama: The Political Economy of Cultural Production in Syria’s Uprising(2014-10-01) Della Ratta, DonatellaIn CARGC Paper 2, Della Ratta explored how one 2013 Syrian television serial, Wilada min al-Khasira [Birth from the Waist] responded in real time to unfolding events of the Syrian revolution. She argued that the serial offers a living site for scholarly reflection on how cultural production and the power relations that shape it might shift, recombine, and adapt in the context of the three-year-old uprising turned into an armed conflict. Della Ratta mobilized the television serial to explore how the geopolitical relationships between Syrian and Gulf political elites had been dramatically reconfigured.Publication The Academic Digital Divide and Uneven Global Development(2016-04-01) Appadurai, ArjunCARGC Paper 4 reprinted Appadurai’s October 2015 Distinguished Lecture at PARGC. In it, he warned against the dangers of “knowledge-based imperialism and scholarly apartheid” and offered possible ways to avoid them. Appadurai identified a growing rift between media studies and communication studies, with scholars concerned with institutions, power, resources, and large-scale data on one side, and scholars concerned with interpretation, texts, languages, and images on the other. Yet, despite the history of this divide, in CARGC Paper 4, Appadurai outlined what we can do to close the growing distance between media and communication studies.Publication Media Oversight in Non-Democratic Regimes: The Perspectives of Officials and Journalists in China(2015-04-01) Repnikova, MariaCARGC Paper 3 grew out of Repnikova’s 2014 Postdoctoral Fellow Colloquium. In it, Repnikova rebuked a popular projection in comparing media landscapes based on a binary vision of free versus not free and objectivity versus propaganda. The frequent focus of Western media on censorship in authoritarian regimes, Repnikova argued, highlights the gap between media practices in democratic and non-democratic contexts. Challenging these conceptions, CARGC Paper 3 examined a journalism practice generally associated with democratic contexts—investigative reporting—in a regime most renowned for censorship and pervasive propaganda—contemporary China.Publication On the Maintenance of Humanity: Learning from Refugee Mobile Practices(2016-10-01) Sheller, MimiThis CARGC Paper drew on Sheller’s Distinguished Lecture and presented a project in collaboration with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and French curator Guillaume Logé. For many refugees, smartphones have become their most valuable asset. While theories of migration have long spoken of the “double absence” of migrants (both from their country of origin and from their host country), Sheller identified that certain researchers now allude to the “double presence” made possible by ICT. This paper explored the increasingly intrinsic overlap between physical and virtual mobility.Publication Emergent Voices and Evolving Agendas: Writing Realities in Cuba’s New Media Landscape(2017-04-01) Morales-Suárez, MarielaDrawn from Morales-Suárez’s Penn Honors Thesis about the evolution of the Cuban media landscape, and developed during her CARGC Undergraduate Fellowship, CARGC Paper 6 presented findings from an empirical study of Cuban journalists, their decision-making practices, the motivations that drive them, the challenges they face, and the opportunities they crave. Morales-Suárez conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a group of independent Cuban journalists recruited from twenty non-governmental publications during the spring of 2017.Publication Theory in a Global Context: A Critical Practice in Five Steps(2022-01-01) El-Ariss, TarekOriginally delivered as the 2021 CARGC Distinguished Lecture in Global Communication, CARGC Paper 17 historicizes and situates theory in a global context, approaching it as an intellectual tradition that has produced powerful critiques of normativity and decentered text, image, and genealogy. In this paper, Professor Tarek El-Ariss revisits his intellectual trajectory and scrutinizes his engagement with critical theory. Reflecting on his personal journey as a scholar, writer, and critic in this article, he delineates five stages of critical practice in his encounters with theory, comparative literature, and Middle Eastern studies. These five stages are: a critique of representation, occupy the canon, impasse and breakdown, cross-disciplinary sublime, and new writing genres. By offering a wide-ranging and insightful overview of the five-stage theoretical practice in this paper, Professor El-Ariss addresses some of the questions and ethical imperatives that we need to raise as an intellectual community today in order to develop new critical practices, writing genres, and forms of communication that operate at both local and global levels.Publication Freeing Freedom: Decentering Dominant Narratives of Freedom in Post-Apartheid South Africa(2021-01-01) Walker, ToniCARGC Paper 16, "Freeing Freedom: Decentering Dominant Narratives of Freedom in Post-Apartheid South Africa" by Toni Walker examines the continuous struggle over meanings of freedom in post-apartheid South Africa particularly for marginalized communities. The paper came as a result of the research project that Walker pursued during her undergraduate fellowship at CARGC. In March 2020, she took a twelve-day research trip to Cape Town and Johannesburg to interview South African Black women, nonbinary, and self-identifying queer artists and visit the neighborhoods, art galleries, and cultural centers where these artists live and work. Through a careful and sensitive analysis of six multimedia pieces enriched with insights from her interviews with the artists, Toni Walker highlights the meanings of freedom that emerge when these artists are centered. CARGC Paper 16 not only situates culture and lived experiences as important focal points for navigating meanings of freedom, but it also argues that some of the most expansive meanings of freedom can be found in the cultural expressions of marginalized Black creators.