Echoes and Overlaps in Arab and African Thought on Media and Culture

Organized by:

• Center for Media, Religion and Culture (CMRC), University of Colorado Boulder
• Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar (#IAS_NUQ).

About the Event:

This preconference examines “echoes and overlaps” in Arab and African thought on media and culture as a concrete step to address inequalities in knowledge production that have occluded Southern knowledges. Participants from diverse disciplines, locations, institutions, and linguistic contexts will explore Arab and African scholarship on media and culture as zones of exchange, excess, and experimentation from which to forge new theories. Adopting “echoes and overlaps” as an epistemology and a methodology, participants in this preconference take seriously the insights of theorists, thinkers, concepts, ideas from Africa and the Arab world as well as knowledge produced and archived at African and Arab institutions, thereby disrupting Western colonial modernity’s continued imprint on our understanding of media and culture. Some also revisit the revolutionary potential of the “dreams of independence” that consolidated old and new solidarities and exchanges between African and Arab modernities. However, more than looking back to long-standing “echoes and overlaps,” the selected and pre-circulated papers show how these continue to live on, alive and well, in the contemporary writings of African and Arab scholars. This preconference is organized by the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South (#IAS_NUQ) at Northwestern University in Qatar, the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the Centre for Film and Media Studies and Digital Media Sociology Lab at the University of Cape Town, with support from Carnegie Corporation of New York through the Arab Information and Media Studies (AIMS) project at #IAS_NUQ. It builds on the promising discussions that took place at #ICA25.

Key Organizers:

1. Clovis Bergère (Northwestern University in Qatar)

2. Marwan M. Kraidy (Northwestern University in Qatar)

3. Nabil Echchaibi (University of Colorado Boulder)

ICA Division Affiliation:

Philosophy, Theory, and Critique

Contact:

[email protected]

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at NU-Q