Dr Massoumeh Torfeh, Research Associate at the Centre for Global Media and Communications, explores the fading chances of rescuing the nuclear deal between Iran and the US in a new article for RT Link to article
Dr Dina Matar, Centre for Global Media and Communications, explores political reactions to the COVID-19 in the Middle Eastern media in an Insight Briefing for School of Interdisciplinary Studies, SOAS.
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum once wrote that playful storytelling “teaches people to be capable of living with others without control; [and] connects experiences of vulnerability and surprise to curiosity and wonder, rather than to crippling anxiety” (2010, p. 101). Her work on vulnerability has helped critical communication scholars shift their focus away from the structural power of media, which has been overstudied, to organic and informal communication practices that can enable
Dr Massoumeh Torfeh, Research Associate at the Centre, explores the new power-sharing agreement in Afghanistan in a new TRTWorld article linked here.
Media and Crisis Mark Hobart, Emeritus Professor Centre for Global Media and Communication We live, it seems, in a time of crisis. Covid-19 and its attendant economic crisis apart, we face crises of climate change, overpopulation, depletion of natural resources, the global political order and much else. How do we know? Because the media tell us so. What drive the choices behind media coverage? Famously, the newsworthy should be negative
The medium is the message? Dina Matar, CGMC The Covid-19 outbreak on an unprecedented global level has further embedded media – as news institutions, as information providers, as spaces for socialisation and as technologies of power – in people’s lives in ways never witnessed before. With information vying with misinformation in the virtual “war against the virus”, news media corporations have reported a monumental rise in traffic as people concerned
Mark Hobart, Professor Emeritus, Centre for Global Media and Communication The Covid-19 pandemic has had politicians, the mass and social media reaching for their metaphors. ‘We are at war’, French President Emmanuel Macron declared in a television interview. US President Donald Trump declared himself a ‘wartime president’. Not to be outdone, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson invoked Churchill’s Second World War speeches to declaim the virus a deadly enemy. The
By Hossam Fazalla and Dounia Mahlouly Nine years after the toppling of Hosny Mubarak, the 91-year-old ousted Egyptian president passed away. The news was met with emotional confusion and mixed feelings by Egyptians. It is the death of the man whose face was in every Egyptian classroom, who was considered a war hero, and yet, it is also the death of the dictator who ruled for 30 years, and whose hands
Environmental philosopher Timothy Morton criticises what he calls a “beautiful soul syndrome” sometimes still prevalent in Academia. By this he refers to a kind of critical attitude that tries to look at the world from the safety of detachment, without getting one’s hands dirty, without compromising one’s own ideological purity. He writes that a truly theoretical approach is not allowed to sit smugly outside the area it is examining. It must mix thoroughly
Dina Matar, Centre for Global Media and Communication, School of Interdisciplinary Studies The war in Syria that has now been going on for nine years has produced ‘the biggest humanitarian horror story of the 21st Century’ according to the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Mark Lowcock. However, it is not a horror story, but a terrifying actuality, the latest chapter played out since December 2019 in Idlib, the last stronghold
