Contextualising the Media and the Uprisings: A Return to History

Abstract

The 2011 Arab uprisings have called into question the assumptions and questions that have defined much of the scholarship on the media of and about the Arab world and its various publics. Much of this scholarship remains largely shaped by the ‘political’ agendas of the dominant analytical paradigms prominent in the 1970s, including the modernisation paradigm. Furthermore, many studies consider mediated cultures as being of the ‘here’ and the ‘now’ rather than a product of ongoing historical processes and conjunctures. This short intervention calls for rethinking the broad assumptions about the role of media in the ongoing protests. While not ignoring the role of media, it suggests broadening our conceptual and research agendas to incorporate a historical perspective that would also seriously consider the material and immaterial ‘geneaologies’—particular histories of nation-states, religion(s), capitalist class formations, national, regional and international politics as well as cultural and discursive formations.

The Geosemiotics of Tahrir Square: A study of the relationship between discourse and space

“…After all, signs do not exist in isolation: it is only through the concatenation of a sign with its articulation that it can have meaning, can signifywhereby the sign becomes the focal point of a system of knowledge (Lefebvre 1991). Ultimately, the study of the "here and now" must be situated within a wider system of cultural and historical knowledge to allow for a meaningful interpretation of events (Matar 2012).…”

From Chiapas to Palestine: Historicizing Social Movement Media Before and Beyond the Arab Uprisings

“…Research facilitated within social movements drawing on practitioner knowledge complements critical scholarship on media practices and the 2010-2011 Arab uprisings that have called for "a return to history" (Matar, 2012). Armbrust (2012) noted that historical media research is needed specifically in the Middle East and North Africa (or MENA) region to rethink the role of digital platforms, such as satellite and Internet, within a broader and more "social history of media" (p. 170).…”

“…He recommended a research agenda that documents the adaptation of different media practices over time (such as radio and television broadcasting) to contextualize contemporary uses of so-called new media tools. Matar (2012) agrees, calling for scholars to situate media activism during the uprisings within "ongoing historical processes and conjunctures" (p. 75). She argued, "there is a need to re-historicize, or to re-introduce history, in our discussions of media in order to interrogate the boundaries of how we conceptualize the 'now' and the 'here' without losing sight of their positionality in specific historical formations" (p. 78).…”

Emotions and war on YouTube: affective investments in RT’s visual narratives of the conflict in Syria

“…Since politically-significant changes to the status quo are in greatest need of legitimation (Reus-Smit 2007), our analysis focuses on three such critical junctures of Russian intervention in Syria. As international broadcasting and social media have been influential in shaping what people know and feel about the Syrian conflict (Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti 2013; Crilley 2017; Geis and Schlag 2017; Lynch et al 2014;Matar 2012;Powers and O'Loughlin 2015), and because RT's dissemination strategy is reliant on YouTube (Orttung and Nelson 2018) RT YouTube videos are an important site of interest for understanding how Russia claims legitimacy for military intervention in Syria.…”