 Hi everyone, welcome to this presentation from the Center for Global Media and Communication. I'm Dr Dina Matar and I am the chair of the Center and I also convene the MA Global Media and Communication on Campus and the MA Global Media and Communication and Digital Cultures on Distance Learning. But I'm going just to talk briefly about what you could expect to do at SOAS and basically what we try and teach and I'm going to talk about the topic of media and crisis. So I need to share my presentation if you could hold on and so what do we mean and you know sort of so this is an example of what you might be taught on. So basically the problem of media and crisis and what is the problem? Are we talking about media and crisis? Are we talking about crisis of the media? Are we talking about crisis of communication? What are we talking about? So the question is how do we understand crisis? Whether we can understand it just by looking at the different theoretical approaches coming from other disciplines to understand what we mean by crisis and what role can a critical media and cultural studies program help you understand crisis? So what can we do? How can we use media and critical cultural studies to understand crisis and the way that it is produced and consumed via the media? So secondly you know in this talk I will be talking about critical approaches to addressing media and crisis coming from critical media and communication studies and political communication studies which I kind of research and have worked on for quite a while and then you know what are the contemporary debates around media and crisis? Why does it matter to think about this topic? So you see this image? This is the image of at Black Lives Matters held by you know a Black man obviously and trying to think of what it means. So what does an image mean? What does the language mean? What is the context behind this image? Why is it so meaningful in a sense? So parts of what we do is try to understand the language that media use to communicate ideas to communicate concerns and so on. In this sense the hashtag at Black Lives Matter is a hashtag of the social movement Black Lives Matter and what does it mean for people who receive it? How is it shared and so on? So what does the image mean and what does the language mean? Our key concerns when we think about questions of crisis and of course the racism at the moment is a crisis. It's one of the key contemporary debates that we are talking about in our everyday lives and in our understanding of how we can address it. But the question is what crisis? What we're not only talking about racism, what crisis is that? And obviously having for all of us living through the pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic, we are in a situation where the only way we know we are in crisis is whether we are experiencing it ourselves in our location wherever we are or whether we know about it via the media. And I think you know in advertently we know about the crisis because the media tell us we are in crisis and because that is everything that we know about the world is is via the media. So we receive news, we receive reports about crisis elsewhere via the media. What does that mean? So in a sense in other words we cannot we come with a kind of hypothesis or the thesis that we try and explain by using critical approaches for media and cultural studies and looking at case studies around the use and the consumption of media is that we cannot understand crisis without considering how crisis are communicated. And in which language? What are the images used to communicate crisis? What are the words that are used to talk about crisis etc. In relation to that question we need to think of another question that's related not only to the language and the image but the question of what are the drivers behind media coverage? What drives the choices behind media coverage? And it's really important particularly in the digital age because in the past what normally drove media coverage was the sense of something happening elsewhere, something unexpected a crisis happening elsewhere that that is unexpected and that is often seen as being negative. So for example crisis of you know kind of migration in relation to conflict and the ways that it is talked about as being a negative issue and as being unexpected. And there's also this the drivers of news media coverage and what decides what is decided on the news agenda is sometimes also considered through the lens that some catastrophes are more important than others and we see that happening today in the coverage of the COVID-19 crisis particularly because of the focus on the now and the here. So in a sense we're focusing at a temporal moment which is the time of the crisis but we're also concerned about the here which is the crisis happening in our backyard. So we neglect what is happening elsewhere and these are issues that we discuss in critical media and communication studies and so as particularly in relation to the invisibility of what is going on elsewhere other than the western world particularly in western media. So what can the production and the creation of media coming from non-western context tell us about crisis as well? And the other question that we ask is who is the intended recipient who is the author of you know the media and crisis the reports about crisis so who are the audiences who are we trying to reach out to and again the question of who is the author who is writing that report and this question is really a question that brings to our attention a question of access who has the right to communicate, who has the right to speak, who has the right to narrate, who has the right to circulate a story and images etc etc and of course we that doesn't mean that we neglect the phenomena that is you know a really important phenomenon in the in the contemporary world which is the rise of user-generated media. So we're not only relying on mainstream media and the media that features so many we are also looking at other media that is produced by ordinary people and in in different contexts. Again how is the crisis imagined we look into the terms that the media used to designate major misfortunes what's in a name because it matters if you're kind of using a negative language to talk about a crisis then you are somehow not really directing but somehow making your audiences think about something in a particular way and this matters particularly if if that language is used repeatedly because it can become normalized that is it can become accepted so for example when we talk about the prices of migration what is the language that we use to talk about migrants do we use the word migrant, do we use the word refugee, do we do we kind of frame those words in a context that brings up questions of violence or bring up questions of you know economy resources and the fact that we have to share resources with others so it does matter language does matter and and the terms and the imagination of the crisis does matter and of course when you're talking about your crisis or the crisis that's happening with an international context it how does do you use the same terms as you are talking about crisis that are happening in other contexts so when we had news reporting of the famines in Africa in the 1990s what you know it was far away what what did that what were the associated meanings around that what did they evoke and invoke and why does it matter it matters because media are implicated and are part of power structures in society and we need to think of and try and unpack and critically engage with this question of power with this said we do not simply assume or take for granted that media are powerful well they are powerful but we want to understand how that power works whether it's shifting whether the fact that we have more digital platforms does that mean that power is shifting from the the elites to the people or is it not who is controlling what and this becomes an important question when we think of the new you know the rising digital platforms that have become huge media companies on right but of course we're not only focusing on the netflixers or the google's or the facebook's or the west western world we're also looking at what is being produced in other parts of the world so the internet the chinese internet how does it work in relation to neighboring countries what is it used for but crucially what we come up with is this underlying idea that all crisis are socially and politically mediated practices and this is where the question of mediation which is a key term in media and communication studies makes us think about the relationship between the production and the consumption of media texts media images and so on so so of course crisis is an analytical context it's an analytical concept that we need to think about so to go back and just to make that make it very clear that media studies has like other social sciences originated in in the western context it's originated out of the history of studies and theorization in the western world and as such it is very much blatant if i could use that word by western centric approaches and what we try and do that so as is to think about it from a non-western centric approach and this way of thinking does not mean that we are just theorizing without thinking of actual practices and lived experiences in the in coming out from the non-western world but we are engaging with these theorizations and critiquing them at the same time by looking at what is taking place in other parts of the world and trying to make sense of them but the idea of crisis is an analytical concept again it's a concept that is very much emerges from a western centric genealogical view of progress and modernization so crisis in many ways and in much of the literature and i you know i must admit that you know the old literature it talks about crisis is happening elsewhere it happens in those countries in the third world it happens in those countries that have not yet developed that have not yet developed the political systems the cultural practices to the same level as the western world and this is where we come from and we critique this approach to modernization by looking at the genealogy of crisis but of course COVID-19 has taught us that actually the crisis also happens in the west and it you know it isn't like the west is modernized or developed to a you know a a new level of modernity that means it is exempt or it is it does not have the same problems as other parts of the world and even moving out of COVID-19 we can think about the climate change crisis that's a very important crisis that is really challenging our ways of living and thinking and behaving and it's going to challenge us even more and again if we think about the crisis around race or around continuous violence against women or around other other practices that differentiate a long ethnic or religious lines so what does it all mean do we still can we still take for granted the approaches that say well only when societies reach modernization and democratization then they can you know the possibilities of crisis happening will be reduced so what we try and understand is that the analysis of terms and the analysis of concepts and thinking about concepts as analytical terms make us think about the emergence and the use and we then begin to contest and critique how such words can lead to a normalizing or a universal way of seeing and explaining the world but the world is not universal there are different experiences there are different histories and so we need to look into that and by looking at how media kind of engages with these different experiences and by how people from the regions that we are researching and studying how people are producing media films artwork you know material on digital platform how through their production and looking at what they are producing and why and for which reason they are producing that we can learn and we can understand more about the role of media in these societies so to go on but of course crisis is not only about you know thinking about crisis as being a condition a lived condition we can think of crisis in the media or crisis in information or information crisis remember in 2016 trump used the term fake news to talk about any media or any report that was speaking or was opposed to his views and of course he waged a continuous battle against the mainstream media and calling them fake news and we have examples of that in in late 2020 and the storming of the capital in Washington and then we also have this populist rhetoric against mainstream media is also in other parts of the world we have Rodrigo Duterte in Philippines Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil Narendra Modi in India Nabil Karawai in Tunisia and what does that mean what response do governments have to deal with with uh you know to deal with populist rhetoric and so in a sense we have countries like Egypt passing new laws against volumes that are likely according to the regulations to harm quote unquote national interest who can define the national interest why is it important to have new laws to regulate the media in authoritarian countries how does regulation work and again we have the academic debate around misinformation which is something of you know we will be working on during in in you know during your study if you decide to come to study at so as we offer we offer different modules thinking about anti-media populist versus anti-populist media what is the relationship between populism and media what is anti-populism you know how do we define populism in relation to media and of course we we think about the the problem of the crisis of misinformation as also being a crisis around the declining credibility of the mainstream media and the ways that even you know more and more youth and young people are actually moving towards either creating their own media platforms and sharing information around their own interests and what they want to see happening in their own context moving away from mainstream media the term mainstream media means the media that is supposedly reaching the largest part of the population like the BBC here in the UK and Jazeera is almost a mainstream media because it reaches across nations and of course the crisis information comes against a this this phenomena of a decline of interest in centralized information channels and official media outlets as people are migrating away from what we often have called in the context of the global south state media state run media and again it's also a context of polarization audience fragmentation and filter problems and echo chambers what is happening here how does that affect questions of you know kind of national identities or the question of community cohesion and so on what does it mean when the audience is fragmented and what type of crisis does that produce so we might have a crisis in terms of the the emergence and the emergence and the proliferation is a very important problem currently around hate speech and extreme speech which is problematic but at the same time the crisis around journalism and around the authenticity of journalism but at the same time we have also the crisis around safety and ethical issues related to journalism and journalistic practices so these are issues that we work on in our classes and these are important questions that we want to ask but we try and approach phenomena to explain the phenomena we do not come with you know kind of trying to say x causes or x causes why question of causality is very difficult to answer because you know things during crisis in particular we find that behaviors can be cannot be completely decided priori before we do the research before we understand what's going on so what we are interested in is looking at the phenomena at contemporary phenomena but that does not mean we are not looking at this history as well histories of media production we're looking at media environments in in the context of the global south we're looking at comparative approaches because we think that comparison can help us move beyond the biases of universal arguments and trying to think of the world as being the same but also as being different so we look at the phenomena to explain what is going on and why it is happening at this moment but we cannot predict the the result or the outcome of what is happening today in the future and the example of the adab spring is a very good example of that because the adab spring is again a crisis it was a crisis in trust a crisis of politics a crisis around participation a crisis around you know kind of people in a lot and though the the use of social media in that particular context has been fact has been debated but the early kind of projections that well this is going to lead to democratization did not happen and so it it is just to explain phenomena and media is so important in trying to explain phenomena before I go into talking about our own research I want to say something around I want to say something around the general approach that we take in our modules which is you know open discussions trying to understand phenomena trying to think of what can the study of critical media and communication contribute towards other disciplines towards the discipline of politics towards the discipline of anthropology towards the discipline of history and law how can we how can this understanding help in these disciplines in other words media studies is importantly an interdisciplinary field of study so our research we have been working on political communication in non-western contexts this is an area of research that I am very interested in so political communication means looking at the relationship between politics and communication and trying to understand how communication is used by both you know regime or state actors or political actors or political elites and by ordinary people and trying to think of media as a space within which to struggle over politics over communities over belonging over identities over gender over race takes place so this is you know in in many ways informs a lot of my research and research of my phd students and we also are looking into understanding production and consumption from a non-western perspective we look into informal and grassroots digital activism in the global south how can that help us understand and think about new ways of exploring informant and grassroots digital activism exploring how it can be used to inform policy for example in the global south gender and the media representations and cultural politics because representations matter who is represented what are representations about what do they signify what do they mean how can we understand them and of course diasporas and transnational communities it's a very important part of the research that we do where we look into the the ways in which diasporas and transnational communities are challenging or and continuing to challenge the national perspective the kind of you know the bounded geographies of a nation and finally news media and practices but that's not all that we do and I'm very happy to you know kind of give you an idea when later on now for questions my email is dm27 at soas.ac.uk our programs we have three ma programs we have the ma global media and communication and the ma media in development these are programs that are that are offered on campus global media and communication which I convene looks into three you know is is quite broad and specific at the same time we look into the political economy of media asking and answering the questions of who owns the media because it matters question of ownership matters and then the second part we look into the political communication the relationship between politics and communication thinking about media and the nation media and the imagined imaginaries of the nation etc and the third part is around you know cultural studies questions of representation cultural and social identities transnational communities religion and media and so on media in development takes a critical view of the discourses of development and looks into how media has been instrumentalized by NGOs and so on to to kind of construct an image of the global south in a particular way and we offer the critique of that but we also offer a you know a kind of an understanding of how we could use media for development purposes and we also have the ma global media and digital cultures that we offer distance learning and it runs along similar lines as the on campus degree but it's a two year degree and it allows those students who are working or perhaps cannot come to the UK to study on campus allows them the possibility of the possibility of studying remotely and we have you know kind of a brilliant group of people whose work has been really very excellent and impressive our students are come from various countries and that is the exciting thing about it because it really means that the classroom even in the context of teaching online via Zoom or via other platforms means that we are learning about different experiences and about different experiences of using and consuming media and we learn as well about how to address and accept difference because not everyone is the same so it's a perfect example the classroom is a perfect example of this I you know a conversation or a critique of universal arguments about the world and about how we see the world so I hope this has given you an idea of how how we teach and I'm really grateful for you for listening and looking forward to receiving your questions thank you so much