NU-Q, ACSS launch new scholarly association for Arab Media Studies
Tribune News Network
Doha
The Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar (IAS NU-Q) and the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) have announced the launch of the Society for Humanistic Arab Media Studies (SHAMS), a pioneering trilingual scholarly association dedicated to advancing rigorous, multidisciplinary, and humanistic research on Arab media in their social, cultural, and political-economic contexts.
The new joint initiative, supported in part by Carnegie Corporation of New York, is part of Northwestern Qatar's Arab Information and Media Studies (AIMS) project and builds on the Institute's long-standing partnership with ACSS. It aims to strengthen humanistic research and knowledge production in the Arab region and foster rigorous, interdisciplinary research that enriches the intellectual landscape of Arab media studies by drawing on a wide range of disciplines. This includes literature, history, and philosophy, media studies, digital humanities, and postcolonial theory.
'Working with ACSS has shown us just how powerful trilingualism can be in creating connected, overlapping scholarly publics,' said Marwan M Kraidy, dean and CEO of Northwestern Qatar. 'With SHAMS, we are building on that idea; not just to promote research on Arab media, but to bring together a multilingual network of scholars who have deep expertise about the region. What excites me most is that SHAMS will be a space led by scholars, grounded in the Arab world, and committed to critical thinking from the South about their region. It's exactly the kind of initiative we envisioned when we launched the AIMS project—and I can't wait to see how it grows.'
The initiative was launched at the ACSS' seventh conference in Beirut, where the Institute led a scholarly discussion under the conference theme 'Devastation, Imaginaries and Knowledge: Regional Junctures and Global Repercussions'.
Faculty and scholars from across the Northwestern University in Qatar community showcased a wide range of scholarly works. This includes an analysis of televised representations of youth in Guinea by Clovis Bergère, director of IAS NU-Q , and three film screenings curated by associate professor Rana Kazkaz and IAS NU-QGlobal Postdoctoral Scholar Chafic Najem.
As part of the conference programme, Dean Kraidy chaired a panel on Arab digitalities,exploring how digital technologies are shaping everyday life across the Arab region. The panel brought together research on the intersections of media, politics, and lived experience. Panellists included Najem, who presented 'Buying Time: Regimes of Temporal Capital and the Telecommunication Vortex of Lebanon', Leila Tayeb, assistant professor in residence at Northwestern Qatar, who discussed 'Arab Drones: Being (Targeted) and Listening', and Nermin El Sherif, assistant professor in residence at Utrecht University, who examined 'Controlling 'Live': Internet Trends, Media Panics, and the Social Reproduction of a Silent Nation'.
In another session, scholars explored how the 'digital' can be conceptualised and studied within an InterAsia framework. Panellists included Harsha Man Maharjan, a Global Postdoctoral Scholar at IAS NU-Q, who proposed a transregional approach to national ID systems in his presentation, 'An InterAsian Digitalities Framework: A Proposal for National Digital Identification Studies'; Ada Petiwala, assistant professor of Media Studies at the American University of Beirut, who examined how digital narratives of tolerance obscure structural violence in 'India-UAE-Israel: Tolerance/Violence in the New Middle East Order'; and Mariam Karim, also a Global Postdoctoral Scholar at IAS NU-Q, who offered a feminist intervention into digital archival practices in her talk, 'Towards a Feminist Definition of 'InterAsian Digitalities': Nazrah Arabyya'.
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