Welcome to the Media,
Culture and Society in the Islamic World homepage.
This site is a course project by the students of a joint
graduate/undergraduate summer course at the American University in Cairo.
The course “Media, Culture and
Society in the Islamic World” is aimed at giving students tools for the
analysis of media representation that links these representations to the
wider social and cultural milieus in which they are produced and consumed.
It focuses on representations of the Islamic world, both those
produced by “others” and those in which media producers in Muslim
communities represent themselves.
The class discusses semiotics and
text analysis but seeks to go beyond this to look at the place of media in
everyday life. Media texts
are nodes of discourses, but they are also commodities, symbolic
reservoirs, objects of ritual behaviors, myths, performances, and foci of
social interaction, among other things.
This class invites students to ask questions about the nature of
social and cultural boundaries, the political economy of communication and
the kinds of tools social scientists need to analyze and interpret such
issues.
The summer course includes
graduate and undergraduate students from
around the world.
The course explores the relations
between code and context in a series of exercises.
Analysis of “codes” and representations is the focus of the
readings students construct of a series of films
that runs concurrent with the course.
The course also attempts to look
at media contexts: sites of reception, audience
interviews, whether the nature of the medium structures the kinds of
messages it constructs and how media itself is the subject of collective
representations.
This web site includes resources
we have used in our analytical work:
a glossary, an Orientalist filmography with links to film
information, bibliographies, notes on semiotic analysis and other
materials.
Additional resources in the form
of other web sites with related or tangential foci can be found on our “links”
page.
This is an ongoing site, continually under
construction. We welcome your
comments in the form of criticisms, suggestions, observations and ideas.
