In collaboration with the American University of Sharjah
December 2015 - November 2017
The project examines the role that the internet and digital networks can and do play in helping what might be characterized as traditional young Arab audiences to emancipate themselves from the gatekeeping functions of print and broadcast media and to co-create their own media cultures. While the ‘meaning of audiences’ has been studied in relation to media such as film and television (Buckingham, 1993; Banaji, 2006; Butsch and Livingstone, 2014), emerging patterns of digital media consumption, co-creation and peer-to-peer collaboration in the Arab region remain largely under-theorised, and with many anecdotal accounts of youth participation.
The research for this project aims to demonstrate how and why hitherto ‘passive’ Arab media audiences may be becoming prosumers (Toffler, 1980; Ritzer et al., 2012: 386) and prod-users (Bruns, 2008: 21) of (amateurish) media content. One of the key aims is to examine how young Arab early adopters use digital platforms to widen the scope of what they consider to be social, cultural and economic freedom; and in tandem, how one might conceptualise their increasing media literacy and criticality.
While Arab youth, like young people in Europe (Banaji and Buckingham, 2013) are not a homogenous group, and many have an apparent aversion to all that is political in the narrow institutional sense of formal politics, the digital interactivity of those who participate, often revolves around celebrities, pop culture, and viral humour. In this context, this project investigates the extent to which the internet and new digital platforms can be or already are transformed into networking communities of civic participation, and what power these networks could be said to have in the current and future transformation of sociopolitical and cultural aspects of Arab societies in offline contexts.
This research thus also proposes to evaluate and theorise Arab youth’s civic engagement and public participation not only in the narrow domain of institutional politics, but in a broader sense that encompasses artistic and cultural consumption, cultural remixing and the production of popular culture as an emerging civic participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006).
Research Team
Dr Shakuntala Banaji is a Lecturer in Media and Communications and Programme Director for the Masters in Media, Communication and Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is a prize-winning teacher and educational researcher with 22 years’ experience and is currently lecturing in Film Theory, World Cinema, International Media, Youth, Communication and Development.
Dr. Mohammed Ibahrine is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the American University of Sharjah (AUS), United Arab Emirates. Before coming to AUS in 2009, he was an Assistant Professor at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane (AUI), Morocco. In 2014, he was a visiting fellow at London School of Economics, UK.
Cristina Moreno Almeida is Research Officer working on the project. Her research focuses on Cultural Studies particularly examining youth, popular, urban and digital cultures, music and hip hop, nationalism and transnational identities, gender and ‘race’. She completed her PhD dissertation entitled ‘Critical Reflections on Rap Music in Contemporary Morocco: Urban Youth Culture Between and Beyond State's Co-optation and Dissent’ at SOAS in 2015.