Call for Papers: Media, Communication and Society - A New Era (December 2018)

Call for Papers: Media, Communication and Society - A New Era (December 2018)

Call for Papers: Media, Communication and Society - A New Era (December 2018)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

NAQD Journal 2018-2019
Media, Communication and Society II
A New Era

The first “controlled openings” in the Algerian mediatic space occurred in the aftermath of the 1988 social movements. NAQD partially examined this phenomenon in its issue number 8/9 (1995). At this time, the unequal flows of North-South information had been reinforced by the launching of numerous satellites that covered most of the planet. Everywhere, from Tonga to Ahmedabad, trans-border television was deployed without any constraints other than the acquisition of parabolic antennas by the public. In that special issue of NAQD we sought to interrogate the position of television which, in the context of post-modernity, appeared both as a privileged object of mass communication and an instrument of democracy. At the same time, between the market of consumerist ideas and a neo-communitarian utopia, approaches and reactions diverged given the fascination with this uninterrupted source of signs, images, and messages.

With the questioning of state-led economics and the state monopoly over the means of communication, the situation was profoundly altered. The development of world economies and neoliberalism, the rapid rise of New Technologies of Information and Communication (NTICs) and their control by the mammoths of the internet, gave rise to profound upheavals in the production of information and culture as well as in the field of image diffusion, ideograms, and content.

We thus seek to take stock of that which has occurred in the domain of the media and society with a critical distance. In fact, twenty years of changes in the media space is highly significant, as much in the availability of programming and communication by cultural industries as well as in the reception and public use by the audience.

This forthcoming special issue thus intends to interrogate the main dynamics of the current realities in this domain and to address the following questions:

How did the repeated demands of social movements at the end of the 1980s (October 1988 for Algeria), as well as the rise of religious and cultural extremism, generate and fortify the ferments of resistance against the unitary media system that had been solidified by the advocates of state apparatuses? 

Under the double influence of the changes introduced by the globalization of communication and the social dynamics of the appropriation of new media, one should identify both the profiles of the actors in the media field as well as how their actions are produced.

Basing their actions on a shaky political software based on controlled opening, rulers in the MENA region and in multinational companies set their laws and rules of the game. Simultaneously, endogenous and exogenous communication entrepreneurs and professionals diversified the formats and contents released in national, foreign and new languages.

What can be said about the content, both as commodified products and symbolic values extracted from the core of the cultural patrimony, that has often been abused by state media since Independence? How can we analyze the “variety – diversity – liberty” of offshore commercial TV channels, which have been brutally providing the audience-consumers with a wide range of unbridled images since 2011, often in spite of the principles of ethics and even human dignity?

But also - since media flows are never unidirectional – how can we make sense of the many uses of this content, multiplied by an infinity of receptors, that the audiences make in reaction to and in avoidance of these contents? 

Finally, we suggest in a purely indicative fashion the following themes for research and critical reflection:

  1. The Ecology and configuration of mediatic systems in Algeria, the Maghreb, and/or the Middle East and Global South. 

  2. Media regulation: laws, rules, regulatory bodies. What are the connections with the universal norms of the rule of law (if such a thing even exists)? What are the concrete dimensions of the respect for the norms of audio-visual public service?

  3. Media economy / institutional communication / advertising / cultural industry: is there competition between commodities and symbolic values?

  4. Journalism, as a profession and a mode of production. The news produced by press moguls both printed and online; how can we interrogate the quality and possibility of professional training for those in the media? What has been the role of professional organizations after the advent of associations and NGOs for the defense of journalists and the right to inform (for example the Movement of Algerian journalists of 1988)?

  5. What are the social uses of available and sought-after offers or the local alternative media available on the internet?

  6. How can we make sense of a fragmented media space that is also resolutely open to social networks? How does this influence a critical journalism that is also respectful of the right of the citizen to be informed. What are the concrete consequences of these observations for the formation of a democratic public space? 

Articles can be written in Arabic, English or French. They must be 30.000 to 50.000 characters in length (spaces not included), or between 3000 and 5000 words. If submissions have previously appeared in another publication, they should be brought up to date and/or extended. The deadline for submission is late November/early December 2018. 

Submissions can be sent to: revue.naqd@gmail.com

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • 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.

    • Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      The entire globe stands behind Israel as it faces its most intractable existential crisis since it started its slow-motion Genocide in 1948. People of conscience the world over are in tears as Israel has completely run out of morals and laws to violate during its current faster-paced Genocide in Gaza. Israelis, state and society, feel helpless, like sitting ducks, as they search and scramble for an inkling of hope that they might find one more human value to desecrate, but, alas, their efforts remain futile. They have covered their grounds impeccably and now have to face the music. This is an emergency call for immediate global solidarity with Israel’s quest far a lot more annihilation. Please lend a helping limb.

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      In this episode, Mandy Turner discusses the vital role think tanks play in the policy process, and in manufacturing consent for government policy. Turner recently published a landmark study of leading Western think tanks and their positions on Israel and Palestine, tracing pronounced pro-Israel bias, where the the key role is primarily the work of senior staff within these institutions, the so-called “gatekeepers.”

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