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In transcending territorial boundaries, satellite television has the potential to liberate viewers from government controls on national media. Why in the Middle East has this potential liberation yet to be fully realized? This book explores the development through the 21st century of cross-border television in the region, exploring issues at the heart of the international political economy of communication

"Are women benefiting from current changes in the Middle East media? With media all over the world still marginalizing women and trivializing gender inequalities, how does the situation in the Middle East compare? Proliferating satellite channels have increased women visibility in the region but visibility does not necessarily confer power. This book explores various ways in which media have been used to open up possibilities for women in the Middle East or, conversely, to restrict them. Having as their starting point the diverse experiences and multi-layered identities of women, the contributors treat media institutions and practices as part of wider power relations in society. By analyzing media production, consumption and texts, they reveal where and how gender boundaries have been erected or crossed. In eleven chapters, Women and Media in the Middle East spans both the region, from Iran to Morocco, and the media, from film and broadcasting to the press and internet. It looks back at women's journalism in pre-1952 Egypt and forward to future trends in women's internet use. One chapter shows how Maghrebi women filmmakers achieved a belated symbolic liberation for the 'colonized of the colonized'. Another reveals how Egyptian political films link the representation of women to nationalist ideals. A study of the women press in Iran shows how it forced gender to the forefront of government concerns, while an investigation of Kuwait's mainstream press uncovers duplicity in the struggle over female suffrage. A chapter on audience reception exposes clashing identity constructions and competing knowledge systems in a rural community. Further chapters explore an experiment in gender awareness programming on Palestinian TV and women's role on Hezbollah's television station, Al-Manar. The book begins by considering whether research on women and media in other contexts can be applied to the Middle East. It ends by discussing the careers of seven well-known Arab women journalists. Rich and illuminating, this highly original book will be useful to scholars, media professionals and general readers interested in women studies, media and shifting power structures in the Middle East"--Provided by publisher

Postdevelopmental approaches to childhood art aim to go beyond the constraining parameters and trajectories of the dominant paradigm of developmentalism. Postdevelopmental researchers embrace methods that enable us to engage more fully with children's art-making by actively turning towards aspects of the experience that may be uncomfortable or disruptive. Multimodal mediated discourse analysis (MMDA) is a methodological tool that can be used as a way to tune into 'pivots' in the action of children's art-making. In doing this, MMDA can be used as a means to provoke a wider and richer discussion of children's art-making. In this article, I show how working with MMDA can deepen our dialogues about taboo, disgust, mess, cleanliness, waste and scarcity in relation to children's art-making.

This article explores Kurdish–Iranian writer–filmmaker–activist Behrouz Boochani's work, at the centre of which philosophical and aesthetic questions concerning displacement and defamiliarization fuel a rethinking of the tropes, practices and policies that mark the parameters of sanctuary, thus allowing its re-imagining from an environmentally informed, transcultural decolonial perspective. The article addresses the genre-crossing interdisciplinary framework of 'horrific surrealism', in Boochani's book No Friend But the Mountains and his film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time as well as other publications that together gesture towards re-conceptualizing sanctuary both on the basis of its historical associations and in visionary anticipation of its urgent renewal. The critical location of Boochani's work in new conceptual islands off the mainland of thought enables a visible, embodied voicing that goes beyond haunting the oppressor in the struggle for more-than-human rights by proposing sanctuary in terms of relational, indigenously formed imaginaries of resistance disrupting the thanato-political, speciesist border-industrial complex.

This study explores the process of constructing mid-nineteenth-century (1858–76) Beirut as a city of the world not merely through its gradual material instantiation in mechanisms of technological modernization and in the built environment but also, more emphatically and enduringly, as a product of the cultural imagination. The article engages the ethico-political parameters of a 'crisis of representation' in the context of both the selected historical period that is one of geopolitical crisis, specifically the 1860 civil conflict in Mount Lebanon and Damascus that brought refugees, military and diplomatic intervention into Beirut, and our ongoing era of intensive contestation and critical attention to Beirut's urban heritage. This contrapuntal framework of geocreativity invites an examination of the output of mid-nineteenth-century Beiruti intellectuals and missionaries (including newspapers, public lectures, the encyclopaedia and the memoir), alongside mid-nineteenth-century photography and cartography by military and civilian visitors to Beirut, and twenty-first-century Lebanese historical literature, particularly Rabī' Jabir's Bayrūt trilogy (2003–07), that recreates mid-nineteenth-century Beirut as a city of the world from the perspectives of the archive and the consciousness of the city's post-war transformations.

In response to Wenar's (2008) proposal which addresses the customary rule of 'might is right', I argue that his approach fails to provide structural solutions to the illegitimate sale of natural resources by repressive governments. I first explain how his minimal conditions are not able to legitimise sales as they are not based on an exhaustive and authoritative criterion that would prevent false positives. I then contend that Wenar's trust-and-tariff mechanism, the Clean Hands Trust, depends upon unrealistic expectations of the resource-cursed government's reactions and its citizens' position.

In theory, the multiple platforms and transnational nature of digital media, along with a related proliferation of diverse forms of content, make it easier for children's right to access socially and culturally beneficial information and material to be realised, as required by Article 17 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Drawing on data collected during research on children's screen content in the Arab world, combined with scrutiny of documents collated by the Committee on the Rights of the Child, which monitors compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, this article explores how three Arab countries, Egypt, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, presented their efforts to implement Article 17 as part of their periodic reporting on their overall performance in putting the Convention on the Rights of the Child into effect. It uncovers tensions over the relationship between provision, participation and protection in relation to media, reveals that Article 17 is liable to get less attention than it deserves in contexts where governments keep a tight grip on media and that, by appearing to give it a lower priority, all parties neglect the interdependence of human rights in relation to media and children.