Equality and the Muslima: Negotiating Gender Justice in the Online Muslim Public Sphere

Since 9/11 violence associated with Muslims has raised questions about Islam’s values and ideals. While the Western media daily represent Islam as steeped in “fundamentalism” and “terrorism” many Muslims and their allies have challenged the accurateness of these claims.

Online Muslim Public Sphere
One of the foci of this discussion about Islam has been Muslim women, their roles, their rights and their oppressions. Mass media are replete with narratives that feature honor killings, prohibitions against educating girls and women, and other instances of women’s curtailed rights in Muslim-majority nations.  Read More>>>>>

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Discourse in the Segregated City: Racial Violence, Capital, and Milwaukee's Media

Image
In June 2015, Revolutionary Books in Los Angeles had adorned its storefront window with a large sign that read: “Ferguson Is Everywhere.” Beyond the immediate denotation of Michael Brown’s murder and the subsequent protests in the Missouri town, the sign also indicated the universality of violence both police and ordinary citizens inflict on African Americans, from Eric Garner to Freddie Gray to Trayvon Martin to others.  There is an additional signification here too, and one that will serve as the leitmotif for this article. This other signification bespeaks the pervasiveness of commonsense ideology among many European Americans vis-à-vis the daily realities of Black men and women. This gnarled line of thought typically ends in one thicket: the belief in stereotypes of the order of the lazy welfare cheat, the violent animal, and the drug fiend, etc.1 This ideology, which also has a specific class dimension, is extremely harmful in its casual disregard and willful ignorance...
Read more

Making Sense of Youtube

Image
This essay began with a simple question: How does one make sense of Youtube? There is no reliable “sample” of videos on Youtube; no easily identifiable ways to determine it’s dominant thematics; no way to evaluate “quality”; no benchmarks for establishment of impact (beyond the questionable number of times a video has been watched), no seminal literature.  For all purposes, it appears to be a new kind of media animal with rules that are weekly emergent. It challenges traditional relations between consumer and creator (Anybody can upload a video on Youtube) and begs the evaluative question—Who does Youtube serve? This essay emerged from a five-year projecti and offers a theory for deconstructing the textual universe of Youtube videos and the participatory culture that surrounds each video.  Read More>>>>>>>
Read more

Framing Messages of Democracy through Social Media: Public Diplomacy 2.0, Gender, and the Middle East and North Africa

Image
This study examines how U.S. public diplomacy directed toward the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and public diplomacy from the MENA to other regions, including the U.S., uses social media.  It analyzes how messages regarding recent events in the MENA are constructed for Western audiences, how public diplomacy rises from this construction, and the resulting the benefits and challenges within intercultural communication practice. Utilizing a framework for social media flow the processes of gatekeeping are examined, from both state and non-state actors representing MENA voices, and western actors who receive those voices, to illustrate public diplomacy from the MENA is a “glocal” construct of the traditions of both of those localities. Read More>>>>>>>
Read more