Media and Mapping Practices in the Middle East and North Africa

A few months into the popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in 2009/10, the promises of social media, including its ability to influence a participatory governance model, grassroots civic engagement, new social dynamics, inclusive societies and new opportunities for businesses and entrepreneurs, became more evident than ever. Simultaneously, cartography received new considerable interest as it merged with social media platforms. In an attempt to rearticulate the relationship between media and mapping practices, whilst also addressing new and social media, this interdisciplinary book abides by one relatively clear point: space is a media product. The overall focus of this book is accordingly not so much on the role of new technologies and social networks as it is on how media and mapping practices expand the very notion of cultural engagement, political activism, popular protest and social participation.

Alena Strohmaier is postdoc in Media Studies with a special focus on diasporic as well as near and middle eastern cinemas at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany). Angela Krewani is full professor for Media Studies with a special focus on the impact of digital media at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany).

Introduction: About Space as a Media Product (Alena Strohmaier and Angela Krewani), Part I: Cartographies, Mapping Empire: Knowledge Production and Government in the Last Ottoman Century (Nour Dados), Who Maps Middle Eastern Geographies in the Digital Age? Inequalities in Web 2.0 Cartographies in Israel/Palestine (Christian Bittner and Georg Glasze), Taking the Battle to Cyberspace: Delineating Borders and Mapping Identities in Western Sahara (Frederik von Reumont), Wargaming the Middle East: The Evolution of Simulated Battlefields from Chequered Boards to Virtual Worlds and Instrumented Artificial Cities (Janina Schupp), Part II: Movements, Iranian Internet Cinema, a Cinema of Embodied Protest: Imperfect, Amateur, Small, Unauthorized, Global (Hamid Naficy), From Amateur Video to Documentary: Found Footage Film and a Reconfiguring of Historical Knowledge (Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans), Cinematic Spaces of the Arab street: Mohamed Diab's Inverted Road Movie Clash (2016) (Alena Strohmaier), Body-Space-Relation in Parkour: Street Practices and Visual Representations (Ines Braune), Mediated Narratives of Syrian Refugees: Mapping Victim-Threatener Correlations in Turkish Newspapers (Ayça Tunç Cox), Part III: Agencies, Documenting Social Change and Political Unrest through Mobile Spaces and Locative Media (Angela Krewani), Reframing the Arab Spring: On Data-Mining and the Field of Arab Internet Studies (Laila Shereen Sakr), Where is Iran? Politics between State and Nation, inside and outside the Polity (Annabelle Sreberny and Gholam Khiabany), Mapping Genocide? Giving Visual Memory to Oral Yezidi Culture (Sebastian Maisel), Reconfiguring the Kurdish Nation on YouTube: Spatial Imaginations, Revolutionary Lyrics, and Colonial Knowledge (Andrea Fischer-Tahir), Index