Media and Politics in the Middle East
This study deals with Arab media and its role in the shaping the public sphere in Arab society.
The satellitisation of Arab TV-channels has expanded since its start in the 1990s. To a Western audience it is the Arabic-medium channel al-Jazeera, launched in 1997, which is most well-known. From the autumn 2006 al-Jazeera also started broadcasting in English.
The issues to be studied are, among others, how the satellite televisions and the internet media contributed to producing differentiated and/or contending public spheres, and how the new Arab media has enabled the redefinition and renegotiation of religion, politics and culture and their intersections in the contemporary Middle East? To what extent, for example, are some of the media channels visibly shaping a form of Islamic modernity?
