Digital Activism and Civil Society in the Middle East (Beirut, 3-4 June)

Digital Activism and Civil Society in the Middle East (Beirut, 3-4 June)

Digital Activism and Civil Society in the Middle East (Beirut, 3-4 June)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

"The Media Project” at the Arab Studies Institute is pleased to announce its workshop on digital activism, civil society, and media in the Middle East. the second in a series of critical workshops, conferences, and events will be held in Beirut, Lebanon to address the relationship between digital activism as spurred by the Arab uprisings and civil society institutions and actors. This event will feature some of the most creative and revolutionary activists, journalists, and technologists from Lebanon, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia. The workshop aims to address the relationship between online protests, media, and civil society campaigns; examine the role that digital activism plays in promoting civil and political rights; discuss obstacles facing civil society; evaluate local initiatives; and share experiences in popular mobilization. Speakers will discuss the role of digital media activism in promoting civil and political rights in light of renewed challenges to social, economic, and political injustice.

The workshop is co-sponsored by the Arab Studies Institute, the Media Studies Program and the Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship at the American University of Beirut, and the Department of Media Studies at Notre Dame University.

\"\"

Conference Participants: Diala Haidar, Bassam Kantar, Safa Al-Ahmad, Alaa Shehabi, Lina Attalah, Sami Ben Gharbia, Malihe Razazan, Neamat Badreddine, Jessica Dheere, Mohammad Dibo, Rouba El Helou, Riad Kobeissi, Diana Skeini, Chaker Noon, Nazeer Rida, Habib Battah, May Farah, Maria Bou Zeid, Adel Iskandar, Shahram Aghamir, Rania Masri, Alicia Cagle, Eugene Sensenig, Nassim Abi Ghanem, and Layal Bahnam.

Organizers: Maria Bou Zeid, Adel Iskandar, May Farah, Elie Haddad, and Alicia Cagle.


 

VISIT THE MEDIA PROJECT WEBSITE

\"\"

 

Conference Schedule

Issam Fares Auditorium
American University of Beirut
Beirut, Lebanon
3-4 June 2016

Friday, June 3

8:30-9:00 Registration

9:00-9:15: Introduction to the Conference

9:15-10:45 Panel 1: Digital Mobilization, Advocacy, & Networking Strategies: Lessons Learned

This panel will shed light on the role of digital activism in creating and boosting political and social change. The aim is to discuss the tools and tactics adopted by activists for promoting civil and political rights in order to evaluate the strategies implemented in the latest movements during the Arab Uprisings, in Lebanon with the “You Stink” campaign, and other popular rights-based mobilizations. It will conclude with the future of social movements online and the digital dimensions of civil society.

Panelists:

  • Emad Bazzi
  • Lucien Bourjeilli
  • Habib Battah
  • Sami Ben Gharbia
  • Alaa Shehabi

Chair: Malihe Razazan
Discussant: May Farah

10:45-11:45 Keynote Speaker: Sami Ben Gharbia, “The Limits of Citizen Media Post-Arab Spring”

12:45-13:45 Keynote Speaker: Lina Attalah, “Betrayal: Online Media and The New Rules of the Game”

13:45-15:15 Panel 2: Obstacles & Barriers

The goal of this panel is to address a panorama of barriers from technical to ideological ones. Discussions may include a description of the obstacles for digital mobilization, and examine different cases in which barriers impact various phases of advocacy (pre-mobilization), during the mobilization, and post-mobilization.

Panelists:

  • Neamat Badreddine
  • Jessica Dheere
  • Rouba El Helou

​Chair: Shahram Aghamir
Discussant: Eugene Sensenig

15:30-17:00 Panel 3: Civil Society and the Media: Vision, Messages and Resonance

Media can serve positively or negatively the causes and ideas of the civil society and how activists can use the media in advancing the struggle. This third panel will deal with the relation between media/activists and civil society and how they can serve each other. It will consist of an evaluation of the use of media by activists during the Arab Spring in general and the Lebanese waste crisis in particular and will emphasize the interrelation between traditional and social media on all these levels.

Panelists

  • Safa Al-Ahmad
  • Riad Kobeissi
  • Diana Skeini
  • Bassam El Kantar

Chair: Layan Banham
Discussant: Rania Masri 


Saturday, June 4

9:30-11:00 Panel 4: Going Hyperlocal

Hyperlocal media can enhance digital participation reinforcing a sense of community through their connections to neighborhoods and the collectives that have a local presence. Are hyperlocal media platforms popular in the Arab World and MENA Region? How can these platforms serve activists and civil society in their struggle? This panel will tackle how social media is contributing to create and reinforce the pattern of hyperlocal media and how people use such platforms to voice their concerns. Additionally, branching from this point, the panel will look to citizen journalism as a way to contribute in the creation of hyperlocal news content.

Panelists:

  • Haramoun Hamieh
  • Mohammad Dibo
  • Nazeer Rida
  • Chaker Noon

Chair: Nassim Abi Ghanem
Discussant: Maria Bou Zeid

11:30-13:00 Closing Panel: Transnational Solidarity

This closing panel reflects on new perspectives to challenge myths and stigmas pertaining to digital activism. It resides in how to build social networks not only in the virtual world but also in the real world across geographic borders.

Panelists:

  • Malihe Razazan
  • Safa Al-Ahmad
  • Alaa Shehabi
  • Lina Attalah​

Chair: Alicia Cagle
Discussant: Adel Iskandar

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Lies, Deceit, and Criminality: Israel & the United States Attack Iran (Part II)

      Lies, Deceit, and Criminality: Israel & the United States Attack Iran (Part II)

      Join us for Part II of our series on the US-Israeli attack on Iran as we discuss the US' recent bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities as well as their national and regional implications.

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 9: Islamophobia, the West, and Genocide with Hatem Bazian

      Long Form Podcast Episode 9: Islamophobia, the West, and Genocide with Hatem Bazian

      Hatem Bazian addresses the historical trajectory of Islamophobia and its significance in understanding geopolitical transformation in the post-Cold War world. As Western ideologues shifted from their focus on the Soviet Union after the Cold War, and increasingly adopted the Clash of Civilizations paradigm to undergird their maintenance of global hegemony, Islam and Muslims replaced communism as the chief bogeyman. Bazian explains how and why this came about, and the centrality Palestine played in its development and operation, both in the West and for Israel. He also addresses US government disciplining of universities and particularly student activists.

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      In this episode of Long Form, Hala Rharrit discusses the factors that led her to resign from the US State Department, the mechanisms by which institutional corruption and ideological commitments of officials and representatives ensure US support for Israel, and how US decision-makers consistently violate international law and US laws/legislation. Rharrit also addresses the Trump administration’s claim that South Africa is perpetrating genocide against the country’s Afrikaaner population, and how this intersects with the US-Israeli campaign of retribution against South Africa for hauling Israel before the ICJ on charges of genocide.

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412