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Ed Webb

New Magazine Aims to Improve Education in the Arab World - Global - The Chronicle of Hi... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...137603

education MENA ArabWorld academia freedom expression censorship UAE dubai media magazine

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • On Wednesday, Mr. Khalil canceled a higher-education conference that was to launch the new online publication because of concerns about academic freedom in the United Arab Emirates, where the event was to be held this weekend. That step came less than a week after a similar move by the London School of Economics and Political Science, which canceled a conference it had planned in Dubai after Emirati authorities requested that a presentation on Bahrain, which is facing political upheaval, be dropped from the program. A scholar on Arab politics from the London institution who was to speak at the event was briefly detained at the Dubai airport and barred from entering the country
  • "We can't talk about upholding academic freedom and launch in Dubai. I don't think it sends the right message."
  • Al Fanar will start as planned on March 3. It is the first major project of the Alexandria Trust, the charity Mr. Khalil founded in 2012 to improve education in the Middle East and North Africa
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  • In addition to starting the magazine, the charity, which is based in London, is helping ministries of education in Arab nations work with top consultants to provide advice on teaching, the use of educational technology, and other topics. It also plans to translate some 5,000 textbooks into Arabic and make them available free online. The collection, Mr. Khalil said, contains the "seminal works" in economics, sociology, and 12 other academic disciplines. He estimates it will cost more than $50-million to obtain copyrights and translate the books.
  • The magazine will feature original articles by reporters in the region and aggregated content from other news media. Stories will be in both English and Arabic, and it will offer a biweekly electronic newsletter. In the future, Mr. Wheeler hopes the publication won't have to depend on grants and donations, but will survive largely on money earned from job and other advertisements.
  • I don't think a publication about higher education can really be neutral about academic freedom
Ed Webb

revolutionology - 0 views

revolutionology.wordpress.com

Libya sociology media

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Mar 11 - Cached
  • Ed Webb on 28 Mar 11
     
    Another source of on-the-ground reporting. A sociologist doing real-time fieldwork on revolutions & blogging it.
Ed Webb

Finding Bibi » Humanizing Hijabis, One Wall at a Time - 0 views

www.mideastyouth.com/...streetart

hijabis veil hijab art street_art popculture Italy

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Aug 09 - Cached
  • The veil changes in different countries, and here comes the sociological aspect of my work: I am very careful in rendering the different types of veil, the Maghrebi veil, the Afghani burga and the Iranian chador.”
  • n important element to negotiating all the areas of culture clash between “Islam” and “the West” is to be able to find a way to humanize each other.
Ed Webb

Common Knowledge : CJR - 0 views

www.cjr.org/...common_knowledge.php

media identity democracy USA cjr analysis socialmedia newspapers journalism politics

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Berelson’s analysis documented what we denizens of the burgeoning ecosystem often shorthanded as “the new media landscape” understand instinctively: that news is much more than information. That it is more, even, than a cultural commodity. Berelson highlighted news’s status as a source both of intimacy and anxiety: news is not only a reflection of the world we live in. It is also a reflection of ourselves.
  • Aren’t consumers better served by many outlets that are specialized than by a few outlets that are generalized? And national news, even in its halcyon days—one thinks of Walter Cronkite, the “most trusted man in America”—was never a paragon of cultural comprehensiveness. Master narratives, the closest we’ve ever gotten to macro-communal news, have been, as well, products of oligarchic exclusivity.
  • consumers are increasingly presented with, and made to choose among, an expanding variety of ever-narrowing news sources
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  • the inconvenience of being challenged in our beliefs.
  • Increasingly, we are able to choose not just which opinions to embrace, but also something more foundational: which facts to know in the first place.
  • a troubling paradox: the democratization of information, it turns out, is in some ways at odds with democracy itself.
  • Where is the middle ground between monopoly and chaos? How do we balance the individually empowering elements of the niche—and the passion and participation they encourage—with news that is empowering in a wider sense of civic life? How do we reconcile the intimacy of news consumption with Berelson’s insight that news is, at is core, a solidarity good? How do we structure a system of news that acts, in varying ways, as democracy’s common denominator?
  • news consumption itself has taken on a quality of itinerancy: audiences, per Pew’s most recent State of the News Media report, now “hunt and gather what they want when they want it, use search to comb among destinations and share what they find through a growing network of social media.” And consumption itself has thus taken on an increasingly self-definitional property: to read The New York Times, or to watch Fox News—or MSNBC—or the NewsHour—or to curate a personalized RSS feed, is, of course, to make not merely a commercial decision. It is also to make a declaration about who you are and how you see the world.
  • There has always been more information in the world than there have been news outlets to convey it; but the explosion of outlets, in particular, means that no longer is slant the key self-definitional distinction in news
  • “The news” itself, as a unitary entity, is no longer something we can take for granted. On the contrary: it is increasingly incoherent—“a mass of niches,” Jeff Jarvis has it. Indeed, the notion of a master narrative itself—the communal melody that, even in its exclusivity, also binds us together in its tunes and tones—is slowly dissolving into white noise.
  • echo chambers—even those that many might think of as ‘the good ones’—have an insularity that impedes broader political and cultural discourse. They distort reality through their very presumption of multiple realities. They assume—and, then, foster—a disconnect between sub-truths and, simply, truth.
  • In And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, Bill Wasik describes the “feedback loop among bloggers and readers,” citing a study finding that 85 percent of blog links led consumers to blogs of the same political bent—“with almost no blog showing any particular respect for any blog on the other side.” In this way, selective exposure becomes a communal activity.
  • “The problem is when extremism emerges from the logic of social interactions”—from, in other words, a system of discourse that allows for self-segregation. And that’s the problem we’re seeing, increasingly, in our journalistic infrastructure. On the one hand, people have access to more dissenting views than ever before; on the other, paradoxically, they are more able to ignore those views than ever before. My reality here. Your reality there.
  • Without “popular information,” we lose not only our baseline of knowledge about the political world, but also our bearings within it. We risk becoming subject, as it were, to subjectivity itself—and ending up with a society, as William James had it, in which “people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
  • That journalism is crucial to modern democracy seems clear; that it is not by any means sufficient to democracy seems equally clear
  • News serves the public not only by feeding it information; it also fosters, in the phrase of the sociologist C. Wright Mills, the “sociological imagination”—the habit of mind required to connect one’s private concerns to the “public issues” that give rise to them. News itself is thus a self-fulfilling prophecy. In learning about our fellow citizens, we come to see their lives as they are: inextricably linked to ours. News begets empathy—and, in that, social capital. Connection is key: as Robert Putnam notes, “a society of many virtuous but isolated individuals is not necessarily rich in social capital.”
  • Mediated knowledge, in other words, united the country. Not by whitewashing differences among its consumers, but rather by giving those consumers a baseline of shared information and discourse that, eventually, transformed an awkward amalgam of loosely connected states—the experiment—into the United States. The nation.
  • The challenge, as we navigate the chasm between old ways and new, is to find a way to mingle the productive properties of commotion with the enduring value of community.
  • “It is hardly possible,” Mill had it, “to overstate the value in the present state of human improvement of placing people in contact with others dissimilar to themselves, and in contact too with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar.”
  • Ed Webb on 21 Sep 09
     
    Essential reading on media, identity, democracy, community.
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